Mll!llimil!l!ll!lltll!tl!l!lll!ll!:  ill!          iltlillilllilHfHIM 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 

GIFT  OF 

DGiN    S3YKOTR 


THE    INTERDEPENDENCE 

OF  THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

I 


THE 

INTERDEPENDENCE 
OF  THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

A  SERIES  OF  SIX  LECTURES 
DELIVERED  AT  THE  ART  INSTITUTE  OF  CHICAGO 

Bring  tlf?  &rammmt  Hettnrra  for  1904 

BY 

RUSSELL  STURGIS,  A.  M.,  PH.  D. 

FELLOW  OF  THE  AMERICAN  INSTITUTE  OF  ARCHITECTS  ;  EDITOR  AND 

CHIEF  AUTHOR  "  DICTIONARY  OF  ARCHITECTURE  AND  BUILDING  ''; 

EDITOR  ART  DEPARTMENTS  OF  WEBSTER'S  AND  THE  CENTURY 

DICTIONARY  ;  AUTHOR  "  EUROPEAN  ARCHITECTURE," 

"THE  APPRECIATION  OF  SCULPTURE,"  ETC. 

WITH  ONE  HUNDRED  ILLUSTRATIONS 
FROM  PHOTOGRAPHS 


CHICAGO 
A.  C.  McCLURG  fc?  CO. 

1905 


COPYRIGHT 

A.    C.    McCLURG    &    CO. 
1905 


PUBLISHED    MAY    27,   1905 


Cfjt  Hakmtoc 

K.   R.   DONNBLLEV   &•   SONS  COMPANY 
CHICAGO 


r  Art 
Library 


7425 


NOTE 

'T'HE  lectures  presented  in  this  volume  comprise 
the  second  series  delivered  at  the  Art  Institute 
of  Chicago  on  the  Scammon  foundation.  The 
Scammsn  Lectureship  is  established  on  an  ample 
basis  by  the  bequest  of  Mrs.  Maria  Sheldon 
Scammon,  who  died  in  iqoi.  The  will  prescribes 
that  these  lectures  shall  be  upon  the  history,  theory, 
and  practice  of  the  fine  arts  (meaning  thereby  the 
graphic  and  plastic  arts),  by  persons  of  distinction 
or  authority  on  the  subject  of  which  they  lecture, 
such  lectures  to  be  primarily  for  the  benefit  of  the 
students  of  the  Art  Institute,  and  secondarily  for 
members  and  other  persons.  The  lectures  are 
known  as  "  The  Scammon  Lectures." 


975485 


CONTENTS 


LECTURE  1 
MODERN  JUDGED  BY  ANCIENT  ART       .       .       .11 

REPRESENTATION  AND  SENTIMENT 

LECTURE  II 
MODERN  JUDGED  BY  ANCIENT  ART       ...     60 

DECORATIVE  EFFECTS 

LECTURE  III 

THE    INDUSTRIAL  ARTS   IN   WHICH   FORM   PRE- 
DOMINATES        85 

LECTURE  IV 

THE   INDUSTRIAL  ARTS  IN  WHICH  COLOR   PRE- 
DOMINATES        1 1 8 

LECTURE  V 
SCULPTURE  AS  USED  IN  ARCHITECTURE        .       .157 

LECTURE  VI 
PAINTING  AS  USED  IN  ARCHITECTURE    .       .       .194 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 


LECTURE  I 

FACING 
FIGURE  PAGE 

Puvis    DE    CHAVANNES'     "THE    MUSES    RISING    TO 
GREET  THE  ASPIRING  SOUL"       .      Frontispiece 

1.  TOMB-SLAB  OF  HEGESO 12 

2.  DURER'S  "THE  KNIGHT  AND  DEATH"    .        .       .12 

3.  DURER'S  "MELANCHOLIA" 13 

4.  PORTRAIT  STATUE  OF  BEST  PERIOD  OF  GRECO-ROMAN 

ART 13 

5.  PORTRAIT  BUST  BY  BENEDETTO  DA  MAJANO     .        .  24 

6.  PORTRAIT  BUST  OK  MACHIAVELLI        ....  24 

7.  HEAD  AND  TORSO  OF  BARTOLOMEO  COLLEONI         .  25 

8.  PORTRAIT  BUST,  IN    BRONZE,  OF   ANTIQUE   ROMAN 

TIME 25 

9.  PORTRAIT   BUST, *IN   BRONZE,   OF    ARCHAIC    GREEK 

TIME 25 

10.   EQUESTRIAN  STATUE  OF  JEANNE  D'ARC,  BY  DUBOIS       36 
n.   GALLAUDET  TEACHING  A  DEAF-MUTE        ...     36 

12.  STUDY  OF  CLOUDS,  MEZZOTINT,  BY  TURNER    .        -37 

13.  "OsTEND,"  PAINTING,  BY  TURNER    ....      37 

14.  "CALAIS    PIER,"    BY    TURNER    (FIRST    STATE    OF 

MEZZOTINT) 46 

15.  "CALAIS    PIER,"    BY  TURNER    (SECOND   STATE  OF 

MEZZOTINT) 46 

16.  "BEN  ARTHUR,"  MEZZOTINT,  BY  TURNER       .        .     47 

17.  "TnE  PINE  TREE,"   WATER-COLOR  DRAWING,  BY 

C.  H.  MOORE 47 

[5] 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

LECTURE  II 

FACING 
FIGURE  PAGE 

1.  MARBLE  FIGURE,  BY  LUCA  DELLA  ROBBIA         .        .  60 

2.  Two    BRONZE    FIGURES,  TOMB   OF    MAXIMILIAN  I. 

AT  INNSBRUCK 60 

3.  DURER'S  "CoAT  OF  ARMS  WITH  THE  COCK"       .  61 

4.  IDEAL  HEAD,  BY  KLINGER 61 

5.  PORTRAIT  OF  RUBENS,  BY  HOLLAR     ....  66 

6.  PORTRAIT  OF  EDMOND  DE  GONCOURT,  BY  BRACQUE- 

MOND 66 

7.  JAPANESE  PAINTING  ON  SILK 67 

8.  BATTERSEA  BRIDGE,  ETCHING,  BY  WHISTLER     .        .72 

9.  MOOR  OF  ALGIERS,  ETCHING,  BY  FORTUNY       .  72 

10.  THE  MATTERHORN,  FROM  THE  RIFFELBERG  (Wooo- 

CUT,  BY  WHYMPER) 73 

11.  THE  MATTERHORN,  FROM  THE  RIFFELBERG  (FROM  A 

PHOTOGRAPH) 73 

12.  " SOUVENIR  D'!TALIE,"  ETCHING,  BY  COROT   .        .78 

13.  "ENVIRONS  DE  ROME,"  ETCHING,  BY  COROT          .  78 

14.  DRAWING  BY  RAFFAELLE,  PRESENTED  TO  DURER      .  67 

15.  ANCIENT  VASE,  "EAGLE"   DESIGN,  TWELFTH  CEN- 

TURY           79 

1 6.  AGATE    VASE,   PROBABLY    ROMAN,  TWELFTH    CEN- 

TURY    79 

17.  JASPER  VASE,  ORIENTAL  MAKE,  SEVENTEENTH  CEN- 

TURY           86 

1 8.  MIRROR  OF  ROCK  CRYSTAL,  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY  86 

LECTURE  III 

1.  CABINET,  FRENCH,  SIXTEENTH  CENTURY    .        .        .87 

2.  CLAY  MODELS  OF  FURNITURE 87 

3.  SIDEBOARD,  FRENCH,  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY    .        .  94 

4.  PIECES  OF  COLOGNE  STONEWARE          ....  94 

[6] 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING 
FIGURE  PAGE 

5.  KNEADING-TROUGH     AND     BREAD-CAGE,      FRENCH, 

EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY 95 

6.  SIDEBOARD,  BY  ALEXANDRE  SANDIER  ....     95 

7.  ARMOUR  OF  THE  SIXTEENTH  CENTURY      .       .       .102 

8.  ARMOUR,  EARLY  SEVENTEENTH  CENTURY  .        .       .   102 

9.  WROUGHT -!RON     SHEARS,     ON     STAND,     FRENCH, 

EIGHTEENTH  CENTURY 103 

10.  SILVER    COVERED    GOBLET,    GERMAN,     LATE    FIF- 

TEENTH CENTURY 103 

1 1 .  SILVER  COVERED  GOBLET,  FRENCH,   EARLY  SEVEN- 

TEENTH CENTURY 103 

12.  GLASS  VESSELS  OF  GRECO-ROMAN   MAKE          .        .no 

13.  GLASS  VESSELS  OF  VENETIAN  MAKE  .        .        .        .no 

14.  GLASS  VESSELS  OF  ORIENTAL  MAKE  .        .        .        .Ill 

15.  REPOUSSE  WORK  IN  LEAD ill 

1 6.  DECORATIVE  SCULPTURE  IN  LEAD       .        .        .       .ill 

LECTURE  IV 

1.  GLAZED  POTTERY  VASES,  FRENCH       .        .        .        .120 

2.  LACQUERED  TRAY,  JAPANESE 120 

3.  IMARI  PORCELAIN,  JAPANESE 121 

4.  INLAID  Box,  JAPANESE 121 

5.  ENAMELLED  SCABBARD,  STEEL  WEAPON,  AND  SMALL 

BRONZE  VASE 128 

6.  TOP  OF  Box,  INLAID  LACQUER,  JAPANESE         .        .128 

7.  ENAMELLED    POTTERY,    FRENCH,   EIGHTEENTH  CEN- 

TURY          129 

8.  CABINET,  ENGLISH,  ABOUT   1870  (OPEN)    .        .        .136 

9.  CABINET,  ENGLISH,  ABOUT  1870  (CLOSED)         .        .136 

10.  INLAID  PAVEMENT,  FLORENCE  CATHEDRAL  .        .        .137 

1 1 .  DETAIL   OF    VAULT,    MAUSOLEUM    OF    GALLA    PLA- 

CIDIA,  RAVENNA 137 

[7] 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING 
FIGURE  PAGE 

12.  LAVABO,  SANTA  MARIA  NOVELLA,  FLORENCE     .       .129 

13.  PAINTED  STATUE,  GREEK     .       ,       .       i       .       .146 

14.  FRAGMENT,  PAINTED  STATUE,  GREEK         .        .        .146 

1 5.  BUSTS,   CALLED  SEVERUS   AND    CARACALLA,    ROMAN, 

THIRD  CENTURY  A.D. 147 

1 6.  POLYCHROMATIC  BUST,  BY  CORDIER  .       .        .        .147 

17.  POLYCHROMATIC  STATUE,  BY  CORDIER       .        .        -147 

LECTURE   V 

1.  TOMB-SLAB  OF  DEMETRIA  AND  PAMPHILA          .  .158 

2.  TOMB-SLAB  OF  DEXILEOS 158 

3.  SLAB,  TOP  OF  A  STELE  RECORDING  A  TREATY  .    159 

4.  CHARTRES  CATHEDRAL,  FROM  THE  WEST  .        .  .    159 

5.  CHARTRES  CATHEDRAL,  SOUTH  PORCH       .        .  .166 

6.  REIMS  CATHEDRAL,  WEST  FRONT       .       .        .  .166 

7.  REIMS  CATHEDRAL,  MIDDLE   PORCH  .        .        .  .167 

8.  MARBLE  RELIEF  AND  SHIELDS  OF  ARMS     .        .  .167 

9.  PONTE  DI  PARADISO,  AT  VENICE         .       .        .  .174 

10.  LUNETTE,  AT  FLORENCE 174 

11.  THE  MEETING  OF  SAINTS  DOMINIC  AND  FRANCIS     .  175 

12.  FRONT  OF  THE  OPERA  HOUSE,  PARIS        .       .        .  175 

13.  FRONTISPIECE  ADDED  IN   1903   TO   CHURCH   OF  ST. 

BARTHOLOMEW,  NEW  YORK 184 

14.  DETAIL  OF  THE  FRONT  OF  SAME        .        .       .        .184 

15.  TRINITY  CHURCH,  BOSTON,  DETAIL  OF  THE  GREAT 

PORCH 185 

1 6.  LIBRARY    OF    CONGRESS,     WASHINGTON,     FOOT    OF 

GREAT  STAIR 185 

LECTURE   VI 

1.  CHURCH   OF  SANT*  APOLLINARE   Nuovo,    RAVENNA, 

SIXTH  CENTURY 196 

2.  CHURCH  OF  SAN  VITALE.     MOSAIC  OF  ABOUT  550     196 

[8] 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING 

FIGURE  PAGE 

3.  LUNETTE,  MAUSOLEUM  OF  GALLA  PLACIDIA,  RAVENNA   197 

4.  INTERIOR,  MAUSOLEUM  OF  GALLA  PLACIDIA,  RAVENNA   197 

5.  LABYRINTHS,  FROM  EARLY  CHURCHES        .       .       .   200 

6.  DETAIL   OF  PAINTED  CEILING,  MESSINA  CATHEDRAL, 

SICILY 200 

7.  WEST  FRONT  OF  CATHEDRAL,   LE  PUY,   FRANCE      .  201 

8.  TOWER  OF  CHURCH  AT  CLERMONT-FERRAND,  FRANCE  201 

9.  TRINITY  CHURCH,  BOSTON,  FROM  THE  SOUTHEAST  .  206 

10.  DETAIL  OF  NORTH  FLANK  OF  FLORENCE  CATHEDRAL   206 

11.  CLOISTER  OF  SANTA   MARIA  NOVELLA,   FLORENCE     .    207 

12.  DETAIL  OF  PAINTING  IN  SAME 207 

13.  FRESCO,  SANTA  MARIA  NOVELLA,   FLORENCE     .        .210 

14.  THE    SUPPER    IN    THE    HOUSE    OF    LEVI,    BY    PAUL 

VERONESE 210 

15.  CONCORD  BRIDGE.     IN  MEMORIAL  HALL,  BOSTON.   211 

1 6.  WALL  OF  A  DRAWING-ROOM,  NEW  YORK         .        .211 

17.  WALL  OF  SITTING-ROOM,  NEW  YORK.      .        .        .218 

1 8.  PANEL  FOR  MURAL  DECORATION,  BY  COLEMAN       .   218 

19.  PANEL  FOR   MURAL  DECORATION,   BY  COLEMAN        .    225 

20.  HALL  IN  LIBRARY  OF  CONGRESS,   WASHINGTON        .    219 

21.  CORRIDOR  IN  LIBRARY  OF  CONGRESS         .        .        .219 

22.  MURAL  PAINTING  IN   PUBLIC   LIBRARY,   BOSTON,   BY 

SARGENT 224 


[9] 


THE 

INTERDEPENDENCE 

OF  THE 

ARTS  OF  DESIGN 


LECTURE  I 

MODERN  JUDGED  BY  ANCIENT  ART 
REPRESENTATION  AND  SENTIMENT.' 

There  is  constant  demand  for  critical 
treatment  of  contemporary  fine  art, —  a 
demand  which  takes  strange  forms  and  is 
sometimes  peremptory.  Writers  on  the  prin- 
ciples of  fine  art  are  continually  asked  to 
stop  discussing  the  arts  of  old  times  and  to 
consider  those  of  the  present  day.  There 
is,  however,  a  very  serious  hindrance  to  one 
who  would  gratify  that  demand,  and  here 
lies  the  difficulty:  very  recent  works  of 
fine  art  have  not  yet  become  well  known 
to  any  one. 

1  Delivered  April  19,  1904,  at  Fullerton  Memorial  Hall,  The  Art  Institute 
of  Chicago. 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

Take  an  extreme  instance, — the  works 
of  James  Whistler,  who  died  a  few  months 
ago.  It  was  my  business  to  obtain  such 
analysis  of  his  work  as  could  be  had  by 
artists,  especially  by  painters.  We  have  in 
the  United  States  a  number  of  painters  who 
write  admirably  well  on  matters  of  painting. 
Seven  or  eight  names  arise  at  once  in  the 
memory  of  one  who  is  conversant  with  the 
whole  field,  names  of  men  who  are  simply 
excellent  critics  in  this,  the  most  approved 
and  most  popular  form  of  the  arts  of  design. 
And  those  men,  though  they  feel  themselves 
unable  to  speak  of  a  brother  painter  while 
he  is  yet  alive, — of  him  or  of  his  works, — 
will  yet  consent  to  write  or  speak  about  the 
works  of  him  who  has  gone,  and  who  is 
beyond  the  reach  of  injury  by  any  possible 
jealousy  or  personal  disapproval.  But  in  the 
case  of  Whistler  there  was  this  insuperable 
difficulty  to  be  met  on  the  threshold — the 
difficulty  that  not  one  of  the  painters  whom 
I  consulted  had  seen  enough  of  Whistler's 
work  to  dare  to  speak  of  it.  His  black- 
and-white  productions,  his  etchings,  his 

[12] 


3     S 


s 


3    H 

I  5 
ll 

«     G 


>  PI 

?    H 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

dry  points,  and  his  lithographs,  even  some 
of  his  smaller  chromatic  work  (not  color 
work  exactly,  as  you  will  understand,  but 
work  in  more  tints  or  in  more  hues  than 
one), — those  were  accessible,  and  the  painter 
who  did  not  know  that  class  of  Whistler's 
productions  might  put  himself  in  the  way 
of  knowing  it  rather  soon.  The  paintings, 
however,  the  larger  works,  the  canvases, 
were  not  accessible.  My  friends,  the  artist- 
critics,  were  of  New  York  and  lived  in  the 
centre  of  things  there ;  but  they  had  had  no 
sufficient  chance  to  study  Whistler's  paint- 
ing. One  artist  had  seen  the  "  Portrait  of 
his  Mother"  in  the  Luxembourg;  another 
had  seen  the  portrait  of  Carlyle  at  Glasgow ; 
two  or  three  had  been  at  the  Paris  Exhibi- 
tion of  1900,  and  had  seen  the  two  or 
three  life-size  portraits  that  were  exhibited 
there, — in  the  American  section,  by  the 
way ;  others  had  seen  and  had  hoped  to 
study  the  paintings  which  were  loaned  to 
the  Society  of  American  Artists  two  years 
ago,  and  which  were  withdrawn  immedi- 
ately because  of  objections  to  the  way  in 

['3] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

which  they  had  been  hung.  In  short,  there 
was  no  one  who  had  seen  enough  of  the 
painting  to  warrant  him  in  grappling  with 
the  problem  of  expressing  in  a  few  words 
his  general  opinion  of  Whistler's  art;  and 
yet  Whistler  and  his  works  —  what  with 
their  real  artistic  interest,  and  what  with  the 
extraordinary  reputation  which  that  erratic 
genius  had  gained  by  other  than  artistic 
efforts — had  not  failed  to  attract  the  atten- 
tion of  every  one. 

There  was  indeed  an  exhibition  held  in 
Boston  at  that  very  time.  One  or  two  of 
the  zealous  students  were  able  to  put  other 
things  aside  and  to  stay  a  week  in  Boston 
for  the  immediate  purpose  we  are  consider- 
ing. But  you  see  at  once  the  difference 
between  that  brief,  and  as  it  were,  momen- 
tary, effort  and  the  easy,  the  life-long,  the 
unconscious  training  they  had  had  in  the 
work  of  the  great  masters  of  the  past.  And 
you  will  remember,  too,  that  when  George 
Inness  died  and  when  Homer  Martin  died, 
— to  name  only  two  men  whose  work  may 
be  thought  as  precious  as  that  of  Whis- 

[H] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

tier — there  was  not  the  same  widespread 
demand  for  a  knowledge  of  their  work  nor 
the  same  possibility  afforded  for  the  study 
of  it  in  a  great  and  varied  collection. 

So  it  is  generally.  I  am  asked,  let  us 
say,  to  discuss  some  pieces  of  recent  Ameri- 
can architecture;  but  the  conditions  of  Amer- 
ican architecture  will  not  become  familiar 
to  me  or  to  any  one  of  my  generation  until 
it  has  ceased  to  be  recent.  It  is  not — 
observe  this — a  matter  of  quickness  of  intel- 
lectual appreciation.  Given  a  building  com- 
plete and  facing  the  sunshine,  and  a  man 
who  has  seen  a  great  deal  of  architecture  in 
Europe  and  in  America,  and  a  ready  appre- 
ciation of  that  building  may  be  asked  for; 
but  this  will  not  be  a  relative  appreciation. 
It  will  not  be  a  comparative  opinion  that 
this  student  forms,  because  he  has  not  seen 
other  buildings  to  which  this  one  may 
properly  be  compared.  He  will  not  have 
seen  the  buildings  of  the  same  class  in  this 
land  of  magnificent  distances, — not  many 
of  them;  and  he  will  not  have  seen  the 
buildings  of  a  correlative  class  in  Europe. 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

And  observe  that  all  art  judgment  must  be 
comparative.  There  is  absolutely  no  value 
in  your  opinion  of  a  building  or  of  a  paint- 
ing,— no  use  to  yourself  and  none  to  your 
neighbor, — until  you  have  seen  and  studied 
a  great  number  of  works  of  art  of  the  same 
class,  and  have  in  this  way  discovered  for 
yourself  the  possibilities  and  the  proprieties 
of  the  situation.  One  has,  let  us  say, 
travelled  somewhat  widely;  and  let  us  say 
also  that  only  a  few  months  have  elapsed 
since  his  return  from  his  voyages;  but  no 
sooner  is  he  brought  face  to  face  in 
America  with  a  mural  painting,  or  an 
equestrian  statue  in  a  park,  than  he 
realizes  with  horror  that  the  mural  paint- 
ing in  the  churches  which  he  has  seen 
in  Europe  is  very  different  from  this,  the 
sculpture  different  in  its  aim ;  and  also  that 
he  did  not  study  it  in  just  the  right  way. 
He  will  realize  that  he  cannot  say  off-hand 
just  how  the  new  conditions  differ  from 
those  of  the  older  work.  I  will  not  im- 
agine him  as  finding  that  he  has  forgotten 
much  that  he  saw,  and  that  he  has  mislaid 

[16] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

his  notes,  and  that,  in  short,  he  is  not  as 
well  prepared  to  judge  the  new  painting  as 
he  might  have  supposed  himself  a  moment 
before  the  church  door  opened  and  he 
entered  the  hall  where  it  is  to  be  seen.  I 
will  not  assume  that ;  and  yet  in  the  face  of 
the  new  surroundings,  the  new  handling, 
the  new  standard  set  up,  our  travelled  and 
experienced  scholar  will  come  near  to 
thinking  sometimes  that  his  study  and 
thought  have  failed  him,  somehow.  But, 
you  will  say,  he  has  his  experience  of  art 
in  general.  This  critic  of  yours  is  assumed 
to  have  a  wide  knowledge  of  art!  Yes; 
and  therefore  his  opinion  of  a  work  of  art 
of  a  settled  kind,  if  one  may  say  so,  is  easy 
to  form.  Let  it  be,  if  you  please,  a  work 
by  an  American  artist;  let  it  be  a  painting 
by  Washington  Allston,  or  even  a  landscape 
by  Homer  Martin,  than  whom  I  cannot 
name  a  more  honorable  and  honored 
painter.  Of  that  picture  our  student  of 
imaginative  or  of  landscape  painting  will 
be  quick  to  judge,  and  his  judgment  will 
be  of  value.  And  why  of  value  ?  Because 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

the  artistic  form  is  accepted,  the  conven- 
tions are  known ;  you  involuntarily  compare 
Martin's  work  with  the  great  pictures  of 
the  noble  past. 

And  so  with  architecture.  It  is  fashion- 
able nowadays  for  the  architects  to  build 
with  Neo-Roman  colonnades,  and  to  find 
their  greatest  delight  in  them ;  and  assuredly 
these  colonnades  and  the  buildings  of  which 
they  form  the  chief  part,  artistically  speak- 
ing, are  within  the  reach  of  the  judgment 
of  him  who  has  travelled,  collected  photo- 
graphs, and  matured  his  opinions  about  the 
seventeenth-century  Italian  and  the  eight- 
eenth-century French  art.  It  will  be  seen, 
however,  that  these  conditions  do  not  hold 
when  the  recent  work  of  American  art  is 
of  a  more  strenuous  character,  is  original  to 
the  extent  of  novelty.  The  moment  that 
this  most  important  departure  is  submitted 
to  our  critic,  that  moment — the  moment 
when  judgment  is  the  most  needed  —  he 
finds  it  unready.  I  shall  show  you  by  and 
by  a  photograph  of  a  most  interesting 
building  by  a  townsman  of  yours,  and  I 

[18] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

^ 

shall  confess  that  it  is  extremely  difficult 
to  pass  judgment  upon  it.  I  think  you 
will  agree  with  me  that  in  such  a  case  the 
best  judgment  is  that  which  is  formed 
slowly.  So  with  paintings,  and  so  with 
sculpture,  and  so  with  the  recent  very 
novel  attempts  at  decoration  —  few,  but 
most  interesting,  most  attractive.  Who  is 
to  pass  upon  them?  They  will  have  be- 
come old  things,  accepted  or  rejected, 
admitted  to  the  category  of  works  of  art 
or  by  common  consent  excluded  from  it, 
before  our  critic,  no  matter  how  great  his 
gained  knowledge,  how  great  his  quickness 
of  mind,  will  be  ready  to  pass  upon  them 
finally. 

It  is  not  asserted  that  the  critic  will 
wait  for  popular  opinion;  on  the  contrary, 
the  critic  with  others,  will  lead  popular 
opinion;  and  this  popular  opinion  will  be 
shaped  out  of  the  judgment  of  the  special 
students  of  art;  but  this  judgment  will  be 
formed  slowly.  If  you  go  next  month  to 
a  newly  made  collection  and  hear  even  the 
most  intimate  talk  of  artists  about  the 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

tendencies  to  be  seen  in  the  works  exhib- 
ited, you  will  find  uncertainty  as  to  signifi- 
cance, as  to  purpose;  indecision  as  to  what 
is  portended  or  promised  by  the  new  de- 
parture; indecision  as  to  how  far  it  is  a 
new  departure;  and  you  will  conclude  that 
it  takes  years  of  time  to  give  to  any  work 
of  art  its  proper  place. 

Therefore  our  experiments  at  doing  this 
same  thing,  at  placing  modern  works  of 
art,  must  be  conducted  under  the  most  fa- 
vorable circumstances ;  and  I  propose  to  you 
that  we  should  try  to  see  what  recent 
art  looks  like  in  the  light  cast  by  the  older 
art.  The  older  art  is  accepted,  is  ticketed, 
and  indexed.  You  can,  with  a  certain 
amount  of  reserve,  discover  what  some 
excellent  judges  think  of  it;  you  can  find 
out  why  one  competent  man  prefers  Velas- 
quez and  another  Titian,  and  why  most 
able  critics,  while  admitting  each  for  him- 
self his  own  preferences,  still  hesitate  to 
express  them  loudly,  realizing  that  it  is  of 
little  consequence  whether  you  or  I  prefer 
Velasquez  to  Titian,  or  Rembrandt  to 

[20] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

Raphael,  or  the  other  way.  What  is  of 
moment,  what  is  important,  is  that  we  see 
clearly  and  well  why  Rembrandt  and 
Raphael  are  both  supreme  masters,  each  in 
his  way,  the  two  working  on  lines  so  differ- 
ent and  yet  so  like;  why  Titian  and  Velas- 
quez are  both  marvellous  painters,  execu- 
tants of  the  first  rank  and  colorists  of 
unmatched  excellence,  although  their  no- 
tions of  execution  and  their  embodyings  of 
the  central  idea  of  color  are  so  unlike. 

To  judge  new  art  by  old,  that  is  the 
problem;  and  the  immediate  aspect  of  it 
which  we  take  up  to-night  is  that  which  is 
primarily  the  representation  of  nature,  in- 
cluding expression  of  all  sorts.  The  sub- 
ject, of  course,  would  fill  ten  octavo  vol- 
umes ;  which  would  even  be  easier  to  com- 
pose than  a  lecture,  because  then  you  would 
have  merely  to  arrange — now  you  have  to 
select  with  care.  But  still  the  selection  is 
possible,  and  let  us  speak  at  once  of  the 
Grecian  funereal  monuments,  the  stelai  of 
the  fourth  century  B.  C.  There  is  one 
which  I  know  by  heart,  because  a  well 

[21] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

made  cast  of  it  was  built  into  the  wall 
above  my  chimney-piece  in  that  little 
Athens  hotel  where  I  spent  five  weeks; 
while  the  original  itself  was  only  a  mile 
distant,  at  the  spot  where  it  had  been  found 
in  the  cemetery  outside  of  the  Dipylon,  the 
western  gate  of  old  Athens.  It  is  now  in 
the  Patissia  Museum,  the  central  museum 
of  Athens,  but  I  show  you  a  photograph  of 
it  taken  while  it  was  still  in  the  open  day- 
light, as  the  sculptor  meant  it  to  be  seen 
(Fig.  i).  The  interesting  point  about  it 
can  be  stated  in  advance;  it  is  a  simple 
expression  of  gentle  womanhood,  and  a 
photograph  of  it,  or  a  drawing  (especially 
if  the  two  figures  alone  were  shown),  would 
not  of  necessity  excite  the  emotions  of  re- 
gret, of  that  pathos  which  comes  of  the  con- 
templation of  brief  human  life,  of  loss  and 
deprivation, — all  of  which  the  tomb  relief 
assuredly  held  for  those  who  saw  it  when 
it  was  first  put  in  place.  Therefore  let  us 
look  at  a  photograph  of  Albert  Diirer's 
print,  the  famous  piece  called  "  The  Knight 
and  Death"  (Fig.  2),  in  which  the  mounted 

[22] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

man-at-arms  rides  quietly  and  with  his 
eyes  fixed  on  the  space  before  him,  al- 
though close  by  his  side  is  the  ghastly 
presence  which  he  must  know  as  Death, 
and  behind  him,  with  prodigious  hooked 
spear,  is  as  Frightful  a  fiend  as  even  German 
mediaeval  art  has  produced.  The  knight, 
Death,  and  the  Devil:  and  observe  that  no 
one  knows  what  Diirer  had  in  mind,  nor 
what  thoughts  he  intended  to  convey. 
There  is  doubt  even  to  this  extent,  that  ex- 
cellent judges  are  of  absolutely  opposite 
opinions  with  regard  to  it,  the  one  class  look- 
ing on  the  knight  as  the  Christian  in  his  pil- 
grimage, while  another  body  of  students 
thinks  that  the  triumph  is  with  Hell,  and 
not  with  the  Christian's  hope  in  Death. 
Those  of  you  who  still  read  Ruskin  are 
aware  that  he  himself  held  both  opinions 
at  an  interval  of  twenty  years,  assuming 
each  in  turn  as  certainly  true.  And  we 
might  give  the  same  amount  of  attention 
to  Durer's  "Melancholia"  (Fig.  3),  and 
explain  to  ourselves,  if  we  can,  why  it  is 
called  "Melancholia,"  and  indeed  just  what 

[23] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

Diirer  meant  by  that  word,  whether  written 
as  he  writes  it  or  as  the  Latin  dictionaries 
have  it;  and  what  the  print  is  about,  any- 
way, as  the  boys  would  say.  An  intelligent 
English  critic  says  without  hesitation  that 
it  is  the  Genius  of  Industrial  Art;  but  if 
this  is  so,  why  is  the  word  "Melencolia" 
set  so  plainly  on  a  scroll  in  the  sky?  As 
for  the  Roman  numeral  or  letter  I,  its 
presence  there  has  defeated  all  conjecture. 
What  is  it  that  I  am  trying  to  show? 
I  am  trying  to  show  that  in  the  important 
matter  of  human  sentiment  expressed  in 
the  art  of  design,  the  masterpieces  of  an- 
cient art  suffer  from  the  same  limitations 
from  which  suffers  also  our  work  of  the 
nineteenth  and  twentieth  centuries.  How 
was  it  about  Hogarth?  He  was  as  bold  a 
characterizer  as  Diirer  himself,  and  in  one 
way  more  unfettered,  more  bold  and  free, 
in  this,  namely  that  he  was  less  restrained 
by  what  we  now  call  good  taste,  and  that 
he  was  more  modern  in  his  time,  more 
immediately  a  portrayer  of  what  he  saw 
about  him.  He  sets  forth  in  many  a  pic- 


PORTRAIT  BUST  BY  BENEDETTO  DA  MAJANO  (1444-1498) 
National  Museum,  Florence 

LECTURE  1.    FIGURE  5 


HEAD  AND  TORSO  OF  STATUE  OF  BARTOLOMEO  COLLEONI, 

AT  VENICE,  BY  VERROCCH1O  AND  LEOPARD1 

From  a  plaster  cast  of  the  original 

LECTURE  I.    FIGURE  7 


PORTRAIT  BUST,  IN  BRONZE,  OF  ANTIQUE 
ROMAN  TIME 
Naples  Museum 

LECTURE  I.    FIGURE  8 


PORTRAIT  BUST,  IN  BRONZE,  OF  ARCHAIC 
GREEK  TIME 

Naples  Museum 

LECTURE  I.    FIGURE  9 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

ture  the  bad  effects  of  early  dissipation,  and 
the  horrors  of  disobedience,  and  the  growth 
of  cruelty,  and  the  miseries  of  ill-assorted 
marriage.  Nobody  can  tell  an  anecdote 
better  in  a  painting  or  an  engraving;  and 
in  that  matter  of  anecdotical  painting  and 
of  sculpture  of  incident  there  is  much  to 
be  said  and  more  to  be  thought;  but  the 
question  is  how  far  Hogarth  was  able  to 
express  more  than  the  mere  incident  which 
he  relates.  Is  there  anything  in  the  figures 
themselves,  their  pose  or  gesture,  their 
action  separately  or  together,  the  expres- 
sion of  the  human  countenance  in  each  — 
anything  to  express  goodness  or  evil,  hope 
or  despair,  gentle  affection  or  brutality? 
Mr.  Hamerton  has  something  to  say  about 
this  in  his  shrewd  English  way,  and  he 
points  out  that  if  a  certain  acquaintance  of 
his,  who  had  unfortunately  a  very  red  nose, 
were  immortalized  by  the  pencil  of  another 
Hogarth,  it  would  be  undoubtedly  as  the 
dreadful  example,  as  a  hint  of  what  would 
happen  to  you  if  you  drank  too  much. 
"And  yet,"  says  Mr.  Hamerton,  "my  friend 

[*s] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

is  an  absolute  water  drinker,  and  his  red 
nose  has  had  other  causes."  Is  that  a  triv- 
ial -instance?  The  difficulty  is  that  more 
subtle  instances  are  hard  to  express  in 
words.  Mark  Twain  describes  the  picture 
representing  the  first  meeting  of  Bliicher 
and  Wellington  on  the  field  of  Waterloo, 
and  he  suggests  half  a  dozen  other  names  for 
the  picture,  one  of  which  would  be  "The 
Last  Parting  of  Bliicher  and  Wellington  on 
the  Field  of  Waterloo";  and  as  another, 
equally  appropriate,  the  meeting,  or  the  part- 
ing, of  Bliicher  and  Wellington  on  some 
other  field.  "For,"  says  or  implies  Mr. 
Clemens,  "nothing  in  the  figures  themselves, 
their  attitudes,  their  faces,  can  express  either 
parting  or  meeting,  or  sorrow  or  joy,  or 
greeting  or  adieux,  or,  in  short,  anything 
else."  Here  are  the  portraits  of  the  two 
rival  commanders  of  the  allied  hosts,  about 
whose  relative  merits  as  winners  of  the 
field  there  is  dispute  even  to-day,  and  that  is 
all  there  is  in  the  way  of  historical  record, 
except  some  partially  accurate  archaeology 
in  the  uniforms  and  the  horse-trappings. 

[26] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

It  is,  of  course,  natural,  as  it  is  common, 
that  persons  who  are  bid  to  study  the  art 
of  the  Greeks  find  it  unattractive  because  of 
its  lack  of  human  expression.  It  is  the 
reliefs  with  which  we  naturally  deal,  be- 
cause the  statues  are  separate,  each  "alone 
with  his  glory"  in  a  literal  sense  of  the 
word.  The  Hermes  of  Olympia,  even 
if  we  had  it  intact  and  uninjured,  the 
Apoxyomenos,  which  is  intact,  the 
Augustus  of  Prima  Porta,  an  uninjured 
antique  statue  of  the  best  Greco-Roman 
time,  are  all  expressive  enough  in  the  way 
of  pure  art.  But  we  are  not  at  this  mo- 
ment discussing  the  question  of  pure  art; 
we  are  considering  the  matter  of  the  repre- 
sentation of  nature,  and  especially  in  the 
way  of  bodily  and  facial  expression.  We 
find  that  the  Augustus  expresses  nothing 
but  a  conventional  thought  of  the  Impera- 
tor's  gesture;  that  the  Hermes  expresses 
nothing  but  the  gentle,  caressing  glance 
of  the  kindly  elder  brother;  that  the 
"Scraper"  is  merely  a  thought  of  how  a 
magnificent  young  athlete  looks  at  himself 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

and  caresses,  as  it  were,  his  mighty  right  arm 
as  he  scrapes  from  it  the  oil  and  the  dust  and 
the  sweat  of  the  pankration.  Now,  we  have 
no  important  painting  of  the  Greek  period 
or  of  the  Greco-Roman  period.  In  the 
way  of  graphic  art  we  have  only,  to  repre- 
sent the  spirit  of  classical  antiquity,  the 
work  of  somewhat  mechanical  copyists  at 
Pompeii  and  on  a  wall  or  two  in  Rome. 
But  as  to  the  figures  which  have  much 
human  expression,  they  are  portraits  gener- 
ally. The  seated  draped  female  statue  in 
the  Naples  Museum  is  called  Agrippina 
because  of  its  sadness  of  expression  and 
because  it  represents  a  mature  woman. 
This  half-draped  figure  of  Drusus,  or  Ger- 
manicus,  or  some  other  noble  young  Roman 
of  the  early  Imperial  time  is  also  in  Naples. 
(See  Fig.  4.)  The  two  busts  which  came 
from  a  Roman  tomb  in  the  Campagna  and 
now  are  in  the  Vatican  are  the  portraits  of 
an  unknown  Roman  and  his  wife ;  and  this 
comes  very  near  to  giving  us  that  pathos 
which  we  ask  for  in  funereal  monuments. 
And  why  does  it  so  ?  Because  the  caress 

[28] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

of  the  clasped  hands  reminds  the  spectator 
first  of  the  life  that  was,  the  sympathy  and 
the  mutual  aid ;  and,  in  the  second  place,  of 
the  separation  and  the  nothingness  that  is. 
There  is  no  mistaking  the  individuality  of 
the  portrait  busts  of  the  Italian  Renaissance, 
— of  the  portrait  bust  by  Benedetto  da 
Majano  in  the  Bargello  (Fig.  5),  nor  of 
the  anonymous  bust  at  Quarto,  of  the  same 
epoch,  nor  of  the  portrait  of  Machiavelli 
by  an  unknown  artist  (Fig.  6),  nor  I  sup- 
pose of  the  Colleoni  equestrian  statue  in 
Venice,  of  which  I  show  the  head  and 
body  alone  that  it  may  compare  the  better 
with  the  busts  we  are  considering  (Fig.  7), 
nor  of  the  bronze  portrait  bust  of  Henri  IV. 
in  the  Louvre.  They  are  expressive  enough, 
but  they  are  simply  portraits.  Each  is  a 
study  of  one  individual  head,  and  it  has 
had  no  aim  beyond  fidelity.  And  so  with 
this  savagely  energetic  bronze  head  in  the 
Naples  Museum  (Fig.  8),  which  is  called 
by  various  fantastic  names  —  Seneca  (an 
absurd  ascription),  and  Paulus  ^Emilius. 
That  piece  is  also  from  the  villa  at  Hercu- 

[29] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

laneum;  and  so  are  the  one  called,  rather 
absurdly,  Berenice  and  also  Aulus  Gabinius, 
and  the  vigorous  head  which  is  set  up 
beside  it.  The  first  is  alone  among  busts 
or  statues  of  good  Greek  work  in  the 
addition  to  the  bronze  casting  of  spiral 
ringlets  made  of  thin  ribbons  of  the  metal, 
each  rivetted  to  the  head,  the  point  of 
junction  covered  by  an  added  band  around 
the  forehead.  Or,  to  take  examples  which 
are  not  necessarily  portraits  in  a  nominal 
sense,  look  at  this  head  of  a  so-called 
Apollo  with  the  corkscrew  ringlets  (Fig.  9), 
—  the  ringlet  in  this  case  not  of  a  flat  rib- 
bon, but  of  a  cord,  a  lock  of  hair  round  in 
its  general  section.  This  bust  is  cut  from 
a  bronze  statue,  as  you  see.  In  this  way 
has  been  preserved  for  us  also  the 
exquisite  bust  called  Plato  because  of 
its  lofty  and  gentle  expression  of  face. 
Comparetti,  the  historian  of  the  Hercula- 
neum  villa,  thinks  it  is  a  relic  of  the  lost 
statue  of  Poseidon  holding  his  son  Taras, 
a  piece  famous  in  antiquity;  it  was  set  up 
in  the  city  named  from  the  son,  Tarentum. 

[30] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

And  now  let  us  consider  with  each  and 
all  of  these  how  far  they  are  expressive  in 
movement  or  in  facial  rendering.  Is  there 
any  widely  different  character  given  to 
these  works  of  plastic  art  found  in  the 
works  of  the  masters  of  the  Grecian  time, 
of  the  Renaissance,  of  the  moderns  ?  I  note 
the  manipulation  of  the  eyeball  in  the  bronze 
bust  from  Herculaneum  (Fig.  8),  a  non- 
sculpturesque  motive  found  also  in  mediaeval 
art  and  not  of  a  nature  that  would  com- 
mend itself,  one  would  suppose,  to  a  Greek. 
I  note  a  similar  treatment  of  the  eyeball  in 
the  Verrocchio  statue  of  the  soldier  of  for- 
tune (Fig.  7).  In  either  case  the  sculptor 
has  stepped  out  of  his  immediate  sphere, 
his  narrowest,  his  most  limited  field,  to 
produce  a  natural  effect  by  contradicting 
the  facts  of  nature.  We  can  hardly  ima- 
gine a  Greek  of  a  great  time  doing  that, 
and  yet  here  it  is  seen,  in  a  portrait,  as  we 
might  find  it  in  other  heads,  both  bronze 
and  marble;  and  from  these  we  learn  this 
lesson  about  the  Greeks,  that  they  were 
not  always  in  the  mind  for  lofty  architec- 
ts'] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

tonic  composition  in  sculpture.  And  on 
the  other  hand,  we  find  the  expressive 
Machiavelli  portrait,  the  highly  indi- 
vidual Pietro  Mellini,  the  busts  from  the 
Roman  tomb  with  their  life-like  aspect  and 
their  memorial  purpose,  all  perfected  with- 
out that  non-sculpturesque  device. 

Now  it  is  a  most  difficult  question  to 
answer  —  the  question  whether  the  art  of 
the  nineteenth  century  shows  any  advance 
in  this  matter  of  facial  or  bodily  expression. 
I  wonder  whether  any  person  present  re- 
members that  picture  by  Arthur  Hughes — 
"  April  Love, "  as  it  was  called,  when 
exhibited  in  America.  In  that  picture  a 
lover,  whose  face  is  not  shown,  is  bending 
over  and  caressing  the  hand  of  a  girl  whose 
face  is  in  full  light ;  and  that  face  has  been 
wrought  into  a  unique  design — it  has  been 
made  the  medium  for  the  suggestion  of 
hope  and  fear  and  that  pathetic  sympathy 
for  the  other  person  in  the  interview 
which  our  imagination  can  easily  supply. 
In  this  instance  there  is  really  an  attempt 
at  facial  expression  carried  to  a  high  pitch. 

[32] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

It  is  possible  that  even  if  the  head  and 
torso  of  the  figure  were  shown  without  the 
rest  of  the  composition,  the  student  of  it 
would  be  able  to  say  correctly  what  the 
sentiment  of  the  face  was  meant  to  be. 
And,  pray,  observe  that  in  saying  this  I  put 
the  highest  possible  estimate  upon  the  suc- 
cess of  the  attempt,  in  this  particular  case. 
For  indeed  facial  expression  without  the 
setting,  without  the  descriptive  parts  of  the 
design,  would  commonly  be  mistaken  on 
every  occasion  and  would  be  rightly  quali- 
fied if  we  should  say  that  it  did  not  exist 
at  all.  One  is  reminded  of  the  familiar 
experiment  to  try  whether  the  expression 
of  the  eye  really  exists  or  not.  You  take 
the  person  with  the  supposedly  expressive 
eye  and  have  him  look  through  a  small 
aperture,  allowing  only  the  eye  and  the 
small  muscles  around  it  to  be  seen — and 
the  result?  The  result  is  disappointment. 
For  it  is  not  inaptly  said  that  the  expression 
of  the  eye  lies  in  the  muscles  at  the  corners 
of  the  mouth. 

The  peculiar  sentiment  of  nineteenth- 

[33] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

century  art  will  be  found  to  be  chiefly  in 
that  the  nineteenth-century  man  had  a  story 
to  tell,  and  that  his  effort  to  tell  it  included 
facial  expression;  although  this  last,  if  we 
look  for  it  by  itself,  will  not  be  found  very 
strongly  indicated.  Here  (Fig.  10)  is  a 
view  of  the  Jeanne  d'Arc  of  Paul  Du- 
bois,  taken  from  the  original  shown  in  the 
Salon  of  1880  or  thereabout.  Notice  the 
violation  of  all  true  sculpturesque  feeling  in- 
volved in  the  use  of  metal  sheathing  which 
we  designate  plate  armour.  A  Roman  gen- 
eral could  wear  the  bronze  cuirass  closely 
modelled  to  the  muscular  development  of 
his  body;  a  Roman  legionary  could  wear 
the  steel  splints  and  spalls,  movable  and 
flexible  adaptations  to  his  leather  coat;  the 
Renaissance  man,  like  Colleoni,  could  be 
seen  in  a  cuirass  and  still  be  a  fit  subject  for 
sculpture  because  the  mind  leaps  over  the 
distinctions  there  and  sees  the  body  beneath 
the  rigid  covering.  But  the  complete  pan- 
oply of  hammered  iron  of  the  reign  of 
Charles  VII.  of  France  has  no  such  capa- 
city. To  put  the  body  and  limbs  of  a 

[34] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

young  girl  into  such  a  jacket  as  that,  and 
such  cylinders  of  iron,  is  to  deny  the  right 
of  the  genius  of  Sculpture  to  limit  with 
any  strictness  the  proceedings  of  her  fol- 
lowers. And  yet  one  who  feels  this  is  also 
aware  that  the  lovers  of  narrative  and  sug- 
gestive quasi-historical  art  have  a  right  to 
insist  that  once  in  a  way  the  sculptor  shall 
yield  to  the  historian. 

Vela's  "Last  Days  of  Napoleon,"  the 
massive  seated  statue  with  which  many  of 
us  are  familiar,  was  injured  for  us  by  the 
rather  childlike  device  of  the  blanket  cov- 
ering his  lower  limbs,  wrought  over  its 
whole  surface  by  a  tool  "specially  prepared 
for  the  purpose"  as  we  were  told.  And 
yet  in  this  statue  how  seriously  is  the 
problem  faced,  the  problem  of  expressing 
in  sculpture  the  feelings  which  we  assume 
for  the  closing  days  of  the  greatest  practi- 
cal intelligence  and  the  most  prodigious 
egotism  which  the  modern  world  has 
known  !  French's  "  Gallaudet,"  with  di- 
rect reference  to  the  teaching  of  deaf-mutes 
by  the  patient  instructor  who  developed  and 

[35] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

imparted  the  finger  alphabet  (Fig.  1 1),  is  as 
perfectly  capable  of  exciting  our  sympathy 
as  would  be  a  poem  on  that  subject.  But 
how  hard  it  would  be  to  find  in  these 
works  of  art,  any  such  facial  expression  as 
that  of  which  we  have  been  talking !  You 
may  as  well  go  to  the  late  Roman  reliefs 
for  pathos;  indeed  you  will  get  it  there  in 
a  form  more  naive  and  confessed  than  in 
our  nineteenth-century  work.  In  the  great 
relief  preserved  on  the  Capitol  Hill,  Mar- 
cus Aurelius  is  entering  a  captured  place. 
The  delegates  of  the  Carnutes  kneel  before 
him  and  pray  that  his  mercy  may  be  ex- 
tended to  their  fellow  citizens;  a  magnifi- 
cent centurion  accompanies  the  Emperor, 
a  grave  statesmanlike  head  is  seen  above 
his  horse's  neck,  and  beyond  him  again  are 
the  helmets  of  legionaries.  And  here  all 
manner  of  non-sculpturesque  devices  are 
resorted  to  for  the  sake  of  the  narrative. 
It  is  an  important  historical  event  related  by 
its  contemporaries,  and  therefore  the  horses 
must  be  reduced  to  the  size  of  donkeys,  and 
their  character  as  war-horses  disappears  in 

[36] 


r 

r" 
> 
G 
D 

M 

H 
W 

- 
O 

X 

2)    n     5 

g         T,          0 

S     w     > 

-So 

-     2     w 


B  0 

e  > 

»  2 

58  S 

r-  r 


- 


STUDY  OF   CLOUDS 
Print  from  mezzotint  on  copper,  by  J.  M.  W.  Turner  (1775-1851) 

LECTURE  I.    FIGURE  12 


"OSTEND."     PAINTING  BY  J.  M.  VV.  TURNER 

Exhibited  at  the  Royal  Academy  (London),  1844.    Belonging  to  the 

estate  oi  Cornelius  Vanderbilt,  late  of  New  York 

LECTURE  I.    FIGURE  13 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

an  innocent  look  and  bearing  as  of  ponies 
in  bakers'  wagons.  The  trees  are  reduced 
to  the  character  of  coral  branches,  and 
their  foliage  to  that  of  bouquets  arranged 
by  human  hands.  The  dancing  banners  are 
allowed  to  flutter  as  they  will,  and  no 
serious  attempt  is  made  to  give  them  any 
charm  as  of  floating  squares  of  textile  ma- 
terial. Nothing  is  treated  with  vigor  and 
with  insight  except  the  Romans  and  the 
Barbarians,  with  their  strongly  contrasted 
costumes  and  their  still  more  strongly 
marked  differentiation  of  face.  But  there 
is  no  facial  expression  there  beyond  a  sug- 
gestion of  imploring  eagerness  in  the  faces 
of  the  kneeling  suppliants. 

We  must  admit,  I  think,  that  the  senti- 
ment which  we  find  in  a  picture  by  Bou- 
guereau,  for  instance,  —  an  older  sister  car- 
rying a  smaller  one  across  the  shallow 
water ;  or  in  a  Knaus,  of  the  christening  of  a 
baby,  and  the  interest  therein  shown  by  the 
members  of  the  family,  the  clergyman,  and 
the  visitors;  or  in  a  Millais,  such  as  the 
"Huguenot  Lover,"  with  its  very  prettily 

[37] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

posed  pair  of  heads  with  their  contrasting 
purposes  to  express,  is  always  of  a  class 
which  would  not  be  thought  to  exist  were 
not  the  story  told  partly  by  the  figures 
and  their  costume  and  surroundings,  partly 
by  the  description  in  the  catalogues,  and  in 
the  more  permanent  treatises.  And  this 
brings  us  directly  to  the  question  of  expres- 
sion by  means  of  pose  and  attitude.  Few 
men  can  draw  the  figure  in  such  a  way  as 
to  explain  aright  the  fact  of  sudden,  rapid, 
violent,  or  otherwise  significant  motion. 
That  means,  you  will  say,  that  few  men 
draw  altogether  well.  Granted;  and  yet 
there  are  different  ways  of  drawing  well. 
Try  to  get  rid  of  your  knowledge  of  what 
it  is  all  about,  and  see  how  much  the  pic- 
ture loses.  I  remember  as  a  good  one  a 
picture  by  William  H.  Over  end,  of  a  boat 
with  two  oarsmen  and  an  officer  in  the 
stern,  while  beyond,  two  hundred  feet  off 
and  mounting  on  a  wave,  is  a  much  larger 
boat  approaching,  in  whose  bow  are  soldiers 
standing,  with  muskets  raised.  The  lieu- 
tenant seated  in  the  stern  of  the  smaller 

[38] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

boat  is  holding  outboard  what  is  evidently 
a  weighted  box  of  signals,  orders,  or  other 
documents,  which  the  enemy  must  not  see. 
If  he  should  be  struck  and  lose  his  com- 
mand of  the  situation,  the  box  at  least  will 
be  sunk  and  kept  from  the  enemy's  hand 
and  eye.  And  the  reason  for  this  action  is 
that  the  bullets  from  the  larger  boat  are 
coming  straight;  that  the  forward  man  of 
the  two  rowers  has  just  been  shot  and  falls 
backward,  the  loom  of  his  oar  striking  the 
stroke  oarsman;  that  capture  is  imminent; 
and  that,  whether  as  prisoner  or  as  corpse, 
the  lieutenant  will  have  carried  out  his 
determination  to  save  his  box  from  the 
enemy.  As  I  said,  that  was  a  good  picture 
as  I  remember  it,  good  in  this  matter  of 
convincingness  of  gesture  and  movement. 
It  is  not  easy  to  draw  a  sailor  at  the  oar  or 
to  give  him  exactly  the  right  attitude. 
And  on  account  of  such  merits  as  this  the  pic- 
ture is,  as  I  have  said,  convincing;  but  here 
we  are  dealing  with  the  matter  of  choice, 
and  with  the  obvious  willingness  of  the 
artist  to  sacrifice  something  else  in  order  to 

[39] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

get  realism  of  pose,  and  thereby  to  express 
the  fact  of  movement.  Or,  to  take  a  larger 
field,  remember  the  battle-pieces  which 
came  out  of  the  war  of  1870-71  in  such 
abundance.  They  are  pictures  of  incidents. 
They  are  not  exactly  anecdotes,  because  it 
is  no  particular  incident  which  any  one 
relates.  One  shows  a  group  of  mounted 
dragoons  who  have  captured  a  smaller  de- 
tachment of  lancers,  compelled  them  to 
dismount,  and,  while  one  of  the  mounted 
escort  carries  in  a  great  sheaf  the  lances  of 
the  prisoners,  their  fluttering  little  pen- 
nons breaking  the  hard  line  of  the  shafts, 
the  prisoners  themselves  walk  stolidly  on, 
smoking  their  pipes.  In  another  a  squadron 
of  dragoons  has  attacked  a  retreating  squad- 
ron,— a  rear  guard,  as  it  seems,  of  cuiras- 
siers. The  forces  in  that  skirmish  are 
nearly  equal,  and  the  sword-play  is  going 
on  vigorously,  with  really  admirable  draw- 
ing of  thrust  and  parry;  and  to  make  the 
picture  real, —  to  account  for  the  retreating 
of  the  cuirassiers  and  a  certain  frightened, 
hurrying  look  which  is  given  them,  —  a 

[40] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

great  cloud  of  cavalry  is  seen  in  the  near 
distance,  a  vast  column  of  mounted  men 
coming  down  with  its  own  cloud  of  dust. 
There  is  a  picture  by  Philippoteaux  with  a 
panoramic  view  of  an  eighteenth-century 
battle  as  it  must  have  been  fought  really, 
and  not  as  the  pictures  of  the  time  repre- 
sent it.  It  is  of-  Fontenoy  and  of  the 
familiar  old  incident,  "Gentlemen  of  the 
Guard,  will  you  please  fire  first."  The  long 
line  on  either  side  is  seen  stretching  over 
hillock  and  into  valley,  as  the  eye  crosses 
the  field  of  the  coming  strife;  and  the 
sense  of  that  line  of  battle  —  its  signifi- 
cance—  is  perfectly  established.  There 
was  such  a  picture  at  the  time  of  the 
American  Civil  War,  though  here  one  line 
of  battle  only  was  seen,  for  the  enemy  had 
disappeared  in  the  woods.  Woods,  you 
know,  were  an  important  part  of  cam- 
paigning in  the  Southern  States  from  1861 
to  1865.  I  remember  a  comment  by  the 
London  Times  on  some  of  Brady's  photo- 
graphs of  the  war:  "Think  of  the  diffi- 
culty of  campaigning  in  such  a  country," 

[40 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

says  the  London  critic.  But  the  interesting 
thing  in  this  picture  was  the  realism  of  the 
treatment.  The  line  had  just  been  formed ; 
the  company  had  just  wheeled  into  place; 
the  unmounted  officers  had  just  run  to  their 
posts  behind  the  double  rank  of  rifle- 
bearers,  of  whom  here  and  there  a  man 
was  wounded,  and  here  and  there  a  man  in 
his  curiosity  and  excitement  was  breaking 
the  strict  letter  of  the  law  by  pointing 
away  after  the  enemy,  asking  his  neighbor's 
opinion  as  to  what  the  next  move  would  be. 

You  see  that,  without  stating  it  very 
plainly,  my  argument  leads  to  the  conclu- 
sion that  the  art  of  old  times  did  not  relate 
things  very  often,  nor  describe  things  very 
exactly.  In  the  nineteenth  century  the 
painter  was  more  desirous  to  tell  a  story,  to 
excite  ready  sympathy,  to  turn  in  search  of 
the  non-artistic  interest,  —  the  to  art  unim- 
portant statement  of  fact. 

Raffaelle's  "  Miraculous  Draught  of 
Fishes"  is  a  familiar  instance.  The  great 
composer  asked  only  a  theme  for  his  com- 
position. It  was  nothing  to  him  if  all 

[42] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

possibility  was  disregarded,  and  his  three 
human  figures  with  a  great  catch  of  fish 
are  shown  in  a  little  boat  with  not  flota- 
tion enough  for  the  fish  alone.  He  cared 
as  little  for  that  lack  of  realism  as  he  did 
for  the  fishes  themselves  and  their  species, 

—  the  Mediterranean  sea-fish  of  the  always 
well-supplied     Roman    market    shown    as 
caught  in  the  Sea  of  Galilee.     Dutch  pic- 
tures of  the  seventeenth  century  show,  as  a 
good   critic   has   pointed  out,   a   Hill  with 
Wind-Mill  —  a  Harbor  with  Fishing-Boats 

—  an  Interior  with    Sunlight  —  a  Market- 
place with  Flowers,  —  never  a  bit  of  narra- 
tive,  never  an    anecdotical   relation,    never 
a  subject  which   you   can   put  a  name  to. 
And  if  this  is  true  of  the  Dutchmen,  those 
sincere  and  most  artistic  realists,  it  is  even 
more  true  of  the   great  schools  which  did 
not  pretend  to  realism.     When  did  a  Flor- 
entine of  the  fifteenth  century,  or  a  Vene- 
tian of  the  sixteenth  century,  or  a  Spaniard 
of  the  seventeenth  century  paint  an  incident  ? 
"The  Surrender  of  Breda,"  that  grandiose 
landscape  with  figures,  by  Velasquez,  occurs 

[43] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

to  you  at  once  as  an  exception,  and  rightly. 
An  exception,  I  say.  I  take  down  De 
Beruete's  quarto  and  the  noble  work  by 
Stevenson,  and  Carl  Justi's  octavos;  three 
most  thorough  treatises  on  the  work  of 
Velasquez,  and  I  turn  over  the  numerous 
photographs  and  cuts  therein  contained, 
with  the  conclusion  that  no  other  similar 
subject  occurs  in  all  the  master's  work. 
"Las  Meninas,"  the  little  maids  of  honor, 
with  the  painter  himself  in  the  background, 
shows  indeed  an  interior  of  a  room  in  the 
royal  palace,  with  elaborately  dressed  fig- 
ures, but  there  is  nothing  going  on  more 
than  that  which  goes  on  every  day, — the 
chatting  and  posing  and  scuffling  about  of  a 
number  of  people,  while  the  painter  stands 
and  watches.  And  so  there  are  portraits 
with  what  are  undoubtedly  faithful  repre- 
sentations of  the  hound  and  the  sporting 
gun  of  the  period  and  of  the  principal 
subject  himself.  Counterfeit  presentments 
enough,  but  no  narration.  And  I  think 
that  the  conclusion  may  be  that  art  has 
gained  nothing  from  the  modern  addition 

[44] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

of  what  is  sometimes  called  "literary  sub- 
ject." Old  art  and  new  art  alike  recognize 
book-illustration;  that  indeed  we  know, 
and  that  may  rightly  have  literary  subject. 
The  sixteenth-century  picture  put  into  a 
German  translation  of  Livy's  History  of 
Rome,  or  the  eighteenth-century  print  from 
a  delicate  line  engraving  bound  in  a  volume 
of  Voltaire's  political  stories,  or  La  Fon- 
taine's versified  tales,  may  indeed  repeat  and 
extend,  in  a  way,  the  statement  made  in 
the  text:  but  this  is  an  exceptional  branch 
of  art,  illustration,  with  which  our  subject 
hardly  has  to  do. 

We  have  still  to  consider,  however, 
what  the  nineteenth  century  gives  in  the 
way  of  the  representation  of  the  forms  and 
colors  of  external  nature.  There  are  cer- 
tain reasons  to  think  that  the  scope  of 
painting  was  greatly  enlarged  by  the  land- 
scape painters  of  this  epoch.  Nor  does  this 
enlargement  of  the  scope  of  nature-study 
consist  in  color  and  the  invention  of  new 
pigments  only,  nor  yet  in  the  added  knowl- 
edge of  light,  and  of  the  color  of  objects 

[45] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

under  strong  light.  Of  all  that,  we  can 
hardly  deal  in  these  lectures,  because  the 
subject  is  too  subtle  to  be  followed  in  the 
spoken  words,  and  because  no  photographic 
view  can  possibly  illustrate  one's  meaning. 
But  consider  what  the  landscape  painters  of 
the  years  before  1850  did  for  the  study  of 
nature's  aspects.  This  Turner  "Study  of 
Clouds"  is  taken  direct  from  an  exquisite 
mezzotint  by  him,  entirely  by  his  hand, 
the  plate  existing  in  his  house  at  the  time 
of  his  death, — a  mezzotint  work  on  the 
copper  without  any  purpose  except  to  ex- 
press the  full  meaning  of  a  sketch  or  of  a 
memorandum  of  his  own,  taken  from  the 
clouds  of  heaven  (Fig.  12).  This  Turner 
painting  ( Fig.  13)  is  that  marvellous 
"Ostend"  which  belonged  to  Cornelius 
Vanderbilt  at  the  time  of  his  death,  as  it 
had  belonged  to  him  for  ten  years.  Prob- 
ably it  still  hangs  in  the  house  at  5/th 
Street  and  Fifth  Avenue  in  New  York, 
for  it  is  not  one  of  those  which  were 
bequeathed  to  the  museum.  The  photo- 
graph was  taken  from  the  canvas  by  some 

[46] 


Print  from  first  state  of  mezzotint 
LECTURE  I.    FIGURE  14 


Print  from  second  state  of  mezzotint 
LECTURE  I.    FIGURE  15 

CALAIS  PIER,  FROM   MEZZOTINT  ON  COPPER 
By  Francis  Seymour  Haden,  about  1875,  from  painting  by  J.  M.  W.  Turner 


'BEN  ARTHUR."     PLATE  NO.  6g  OF  LIBER  STUD1ORUM 

Drawn  and  etched  on  the  copper  by  J.  M.  W.  Turner.    Engraved  in 

mezzotint  by  T.  Lupton,  1873 

LECTURE  I.    FIGURE  16 


"THE  PINE-TREE" 
Water-Color  Drawing  by  Charles  Herbert  Moore 

LECTURE  I.    FIGURE  17 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

interposition  of  a  most  influential  man  in 
such  matters,  the  late  Samuel  Putnam  Avery, 
and  it  is  precious  in  proportion  to  the  diffi- 
culty of  procuring  adequate  photographs 
under  such  conditions. 

When  the  real  Turnerian  begins  to  talk 
Turner,  it  is  hard  to  stop  him,  and  I  must 
control  my  own  utterances,  because  to  one 
who  has  studied  long  and  heartily  enjoyed 
the  Turner  painting  of  mist  and  fog,  cloud 
and  storm,  rain  and  snow,  foam  and  spray, 
there  is  nothing  quite  so  bewitching  in  the 
whole  range  of  modern  art.  At  least  it  is 
certain  that  no  one  of  the  ancients  ever 
tried  to  do  it.  Titian  was  a  great  landscape- 
painter  and  loved  the  mountain  country 
about  Cadore,  but  what  would  he  have  said 
had  you  asked  him  to  paint  the  mountain 
mists  as  his  principal  subject? 

Turner's  "  Calais  Pier,"  a  picture  which 
is  in  the  National  Gallery  at  London,  has 
been  engraved  often  enough,  producing 
prints  which  have,  one  must  confess,  a 
somewhat  commercial  aspect.  But  here  is 
the  rendering  of  it  by  a  very  powerful 

[47] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

etcher  of  our  own  times,  still  living  though 
an  old  man  and  no  longer  at  work,  Fran- 
cis Seymour  Haden,  whom  they  have  dis- 
guised by  knighting  him.  This  (Fig.  14) 
is  the  first  state  of  the  print,  and  I  will 
show  you  the  second  state  in  a  moment. 
The  student  of  modern  etchings  will  say  to 
you  that  this  is  the  best  Haden  there  is, 
because  in  addition  to  its  being  very  large 
and  worked  with  prodigious  force  and 
energy,  with  deep  bitings  and  most  vigorous 
treatment,  it  is  the  only  Haden  in  which  he 
had  a  stronger  man  than  himself  to  make 
his  design.  A  student  of  nature,  Haden  is 
a  gentle  and  loving  one,  with  a  great  fond- 
ness for  trees  and  for  quiet  English  land- 
scapes; but  a  great  composer  he  is  not. 
Turner  was  a  great  composer,  if  you  like, 
and  it  was  a  wise  thing  in  Haden  to  make 
his  greatest  effort  depend  in  this  way  on 
Turner's  design,  while  he  invested  it  with 
his  own  unsurpassed  mastery  of  technique. 
I  said  this  was  the  first  state.  Notice  the 
boiling  mass  of  heavy  clouds  on  the  left. 
In  the  etching  this  is  printed  in  dark 

[48] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

brown,  in  bistre,  or  the  like;  the  effect  is 
enhanced  by  the  burr  which  at  times  almost 
conceals  the  lines.  It  is  a  most  powerful 
composition  in  black  and  white,  or  brown 
and  white,  this  state  of  the  print;  and  yet 
when  I  instructed  a  London  dealer  who 
knew  Haden  well  to  get  me  a  copy  of  the 
first  state,  this  answer  came  back  direct 
from  the  artist :  "  Tell  Mr.  Sturgis  that  if 
he  has  a  good  copy  of  the  second  state  he 
should  really  be  content.  It  was  for  the 
second  state  that  I  worked;  that  is  the  finer 
print  of  the  two." 

Here  then  (Fig.  15)  is  the  second  state, 
and  you  see  how  greatly  the  composition  is 
changed  by  simply  planing  down  the  plate 
so  as  to  produce  a  vast  blank  space  of  sky 
between  the  heavier  clouds  on  the  left  and 
those  on  the  right.  There  is  no  per- 
ceptible change  in  the  lower  part  of  the 
print  except  in  a  deliberate  diminishing  of 
the  blackness  everywhere.  Haden  guards 
his  plates  with  religious  care,  sees  every 
copy  printed,  and  allows  no  one  to  be  sold 
which  is  not  faultless  as  an  impression. 

[49] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

Moreover,  the  proof  from  which  this  pho- 
tograph was  taken  was  completed  as  early 
as  1878. 

A  very  different  piece  of  modern  work, 
though  it  is  by  the  same  great  master,  Joseph 
Mallord  William  Turner,  is  the  drawing  in 
the  possession  of  the  proprietor  of  Farnley 
Hall,  the  name  of  which  is  "A  First-Rate 
Taking  in  Stores.'*  It  is  a  bit  of  that  life- 
long study  of  the  British  navy  of  the  post- 
Nelson  day,  the  huge  three-deckers,  which 
it  is  hard  for  us  to  imagine  as  really  impelled 
by  sails  and  by  wind  power  alone,  and  which 
had  for  Turner  that  charm  which  a  Lon- 
doner, a  street  boy,  a  haunter  of  the  wharves 
and  docks,  a  student  from  childhood  of 
rigging  and  sails  and  hulls,  and  a  patriot  as 
well  would  surely  come  to  feel;  and  it  is 
curious  to  see  how  this  most  non-realistic 
of  painters,  this  most  deliberate  and  con- 
vinced designer,  the  man  more  than  any 
other  Englishman  to  determine  on  a 
composition  and  make  it  without  regard 
to  the  natural  facts  which  suggested  it  to 
him  —  it  is  curious  to  see  him  studying  so 

[50] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

minutely  the  ports,  with  the  port-lids  swung 
open  at  a  regular  angle,  and,  run  out  below 
them,  the  muzzles  of  the  42-pounders  on 
the  main  deck  and  the  32-pounders  above, 
the  quarter-gallery  in  the  distance  and  the 
rounding  of  the  bow  near  at  hand,  the 
chains  above  where  the  shrouds  are  made 
fast,  the  anchor  at  its  beckets,  and,  opposite 
to  that  monstrous  towering  hull  of  the  80- 
gun  ship,  the  two  lighters,  whose  masts  as 
well  as  their  little  flag-pole  at  the  top  reach 
only  to  the  third  tier  of  guns  of  the  man- 
of-war.  This  is  description  of  a  kind  which 
the  Dutchmen  would  have  loved.  But  now 
let  us  take  a  good  and  careful  draughtsman 
who  is  very  little  of  an  artist  but  every- 
thing of  a  loving  student  of  nature.  Let 
us  see  what  could  be  done  in  the  nineteenth 
century  between  1840  and  1860.  There 
is  a  drawing  by  Ruskin,  engraved  for 
"Modern  Painters,"  as  plate  84  of  the 
fifth  volume,  and  in  the  first  edition  of  this 
it  appears  as  a  noble  print.  The  subject, 
Peace,  is  a  minute  study  of  the  moat  of 
a  mediaeval  town.  The  bounding  wall  of 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

the  fortification  goes  running  away  at  the 
left,  overgrown  with  vines  and  half 
hidden  by  trees;  and  some  one  has  built 
a  house  against  it  on  the  inner  side, — 
windows  for  which  house  are  cut  right 
through  the  massive  ancient  stonework. 
The  towers  mark  the  places  where  there 
are  gateways;  for  this  fortification  is  not 
that  of  a  great  post  or  of  an  important 
strategic  point ;  it  is  merely  the  defence  for 
a  little  mediasval  town  against  roving  bands 
or  hastily  gathered  armies  of  the  neighbor- 
hood. The  wooden  galleries  at  the  top  of 
these  towers  are  simply  the  bretesches  put 
in  place  to  protect  the  defenders,  who  show- 
ered their  missiles  upon  the  enemy  below. 
For,  as  you  are  aware,  it  was  by  missiles 
thrown  vertically  from  above  downward, 
and  by  arrows  and  bolts  shot  also  from 
above,  that  the  siege  of  a  mediaeval  post  was 
resisted.  Now,  compare  with  this  modern 
work  the  older  man's  way  of  looking  at  a 
precisely  similar  case.  Hollar's  view  of 
Lucerne  is  indeed  intended  to  convey  with 
topographical  accuracy  the  notion  of  the 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

whole  city  and  its  immediate  neighborhood ; 
but  in  this  fact  itself  there  lies  a  notable 
difference  between  the  modern  and  the  an- 
cient in  their  ways  of  talking  about  a  town. 
The  modern  study  of  nature  and  pro- 
found love  of  purely  natural  aspects  is  shown 
in  the  careful  and  almost  scientific  observa- 
tion which  landscape-painters  have  given  to 
mountain  forms.  The  best  instance  of  this 
that  one  can  think  of  is  Turner's  wonderful 
print,  Ben  Arthur,  No.  69  of  the  Liber 
Studiorum  (see  Fig.  16).  No  one  would 
assert  that  it  is  a  faithful  portrait,  or  even 
that  it  is  intended  to  be  a  faithful  portrait  of 
the  mountain-side  and  the  stone-encumbered 
valley.  There  may  be  an  immeasurable  dis- 
crepancy in  fact,  the  artist  trying  always  to 
give  a  great  effect,  and  caring  little  about  the 
accuracy  of  his  details.  The  great  effect  that 
he  desired  was  of  course  the  character  of 
the  mountain  slopes,  the  markings  of  water- 
courses, the  indication  by  light  and  shade 
of  the  folds  of  the  stratified  rock,  and  again 
by  the  growth  of  trees  in  the  ravines  and 
hollows.  We  may  concern  ourselves  here 

[53] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

with  the  joy  which  the  modern  landscape- 
painter  has  taken  in  the  complexity  of  the 
structural  forms  of  mountains.  You  will 
find  that  there  is  nothing  like  this  joy,  this 
knowledge,  this  artistic  insight,  in  any  work 
of  men  previous  to  1830. 

But  take  another  aspect  of  nature,  a  very 
different  aspect,  indeed.  Look  at  this  draw- 
ing by  Charles  Herbert  Moore,  "The  Pine 
Tree  "  (Fig.  1 7).  This  is  a  drawing  made  in 
1 864,  when  that  teacher  of  art  was  filled  with 
his  youthful  enthusiasm,  and  was  working 
hard  for  what  he  thought  to  be  the  only 
career  for  an  artist  who  was  also  a  man  of  con- 
science. The  charm  of  the  drawing  is 
partly  lost  in  the  loss  of  the  pale  blue  and 
white  sky  which  the  photograph  will  not 
render.  Apart  from  that  it  is  easy  to  see 
that  the  hilltop  and  its  scarped  and  broken 
slope  where  the  diggers  have  been  at  work 
are  studied  as  carefully  from  nature  as  Ben 
Arthur,  and  that  in  like  manner  the  setting 
down  of  the  distant  fields  and  low  hillsides 
is  religious  in  its  minute  accuracy.  The 
same  words  are  to  be  applied  to  the  drawing 

[54] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

of  the  pine-tree  and  the  two  little  juni- 
per-trees. They  are  mapped  upon  the  sky 
with  precise  and  painstaking  accuracy;  and 
yet,  to  one  who  loves  the  trees  themselves, 
and  who  cares  for  that  manifestation  of 
nature  which  the  trees  represent,  it  is  a 
lovely  drawing.  Powerful  it  is  not;  rich  in 
color  it  is  not ;  it  is  not  strong  in  synthesis, 
nor  in  that  instinctive  selection  of  the  vital 
truths  which  makes  Turner's  landscape  so 
great.  But  the  subject  is  chosen  to  fit  the 
artist's  power  and  scope,  and  he  has  treated 
it  in  a  faultless  way. 

The  hastening,  struggling  modern  world 
has  so  affected  the  mind  of  most  of  the  art- 
workers,  with  all  their  willingness  to  keep 
out  of  it,  that  they  also  hasten,  and  believe 
time  lost  which  is  spent  in  elaborating  mi- 
nute details.  This  view  of  the  painter's 
art,  the  notion  that  he  will  do  more  good 
for  himself  and  for  others  by  disregarding 
minute  details  and  by  seizing  those  general 
truths  which  a  swift  and  dexterous  synthesis 
will  give  him  —  this  is  a  perfectly  legitimate 
view:  moreover  it  has  been  the  victorious 

[55] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

principle,  now  for  many  years.  The  artist 
has  a  perfect  right  to  say  and  to  act  as 
if  it  were  hardly  worth  while  to  spend 
months  in  the  elaboration  of  details,  when 
hours  given  to  the  painting  of  effects  will 
do  more  toward  the  completion  of  a  pic- 
ture, an  impressive,  a  powerful  work  of  art. 
In  insisting  on  the  merits  of  Moore's  draw- 
ing I  am  talking  exactly  as  if  I  were  pre- 
senting the  minute  handling  of  the  brothers 
Van  Eyck  or  any  one  of  the  Florentines 
painting  their  delicate  background  in  the 
first  half  of  the  fifteenth  century.  Moore 
is  incomparably  more  truthful  in  his  work, 
because  he  belongs  to  an  epoch  which  rec- 
ognizes the  worth  of  precise  accuracy  of 
record.  He  cannot  be  a  better  artist,  be- 
cause his  epoch  is  not  nearly  so  close  to  art 
as  was  the  fifteenth  century.  My  purpose 
is  merely  to  show  you  that  the  same  love 
of  nature  which  is  characteristic  of  the  mod- 
ern is  expressible  and  has  been  expressed 
with  the  minute  touch  of  the  painter  of 
detail  as  well  as  in  the  headlong  work  of 
Turner's  mighty  composition.  We  do  not 

[56] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

know  whether  a  movement  will  be  started 
to  oppose  impressionism  in  all  its  forms  and 
set  up  once  more  the  gospel  of  minute  study 
of  details. 

There  is  still  another  side  to  the  ex- 
pressional  art  of  modern  times.  It  cannot 
be  left  without  a  word.  It  takes  its  shape 
usually  in  the  way  of  illustration  —  illustra- 
trations  to  books,  though  by  no  means  only 
to  be  found  there.  Cruikshank's  etchings, 
made  in  his  prime,  though  certainly  too 
huddled  and  too  slightly  drawn,  are  yet 
great  as  record,  as  relation  of  incident;  as 
in  the  imaginary  scene  of  Jack  Falstaff,  as 
Justice  Shallow  describes  him.  He  was  "a 
boy  and  page  to  Thomas  Mowbray,  Duke 
of  Norfolk.  I  see  him  break  Skogan's 
head  at  the  court-gate  when  'a  was  a  crack 
not  thus  high."  I  wonder  whether  the 
most  elaborate  examination  of  seventeenth- 
century  books  would  reveal  to  us  such  hu- 
moristic  treatment  of  semi-historical  subjects 
as  this.  According  to  his  lights  George 
Cruikshank  has  been  a  careful  recorder  of 
details  of  architecture  and  costume. 

[57] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

But  passing  over  the  purely  humorous 
side  of  modern  expressional  art,  consider 
also  the  strange,  half-literary  study  of  the 
past  and  the  present  in  the  way  of  exciting 
incidents  recorded  or  imagined.  Max  Klin- 
ger's  remarkable  study  of  the  Centaur  shows 
how  he,  the  Centaur,  would  escape  from 
the  prehistoric  Greeks  who  were  pursuing 
him,  naked,  mounted  on  barebacked  horses. 
The  Greeks  wear  what  may  be  thought 
steel  caps,  and  that  is  a  bold  assumption  for 
men  of  the  twelfth  or  twentieth  century 
B.  C.,  the  time  when  Centaurs  flourished 
in  the  mountains  of  Thessaly  and  often  in- 
vaded the  lowlands ;  but  then  the  caps  may 
be  of  bronze,  and  the  chronological  limits 
of  the  bronze  age  are  not  precisely  fixed. 
The  bow  and  arrow  has  always  been  the 
weapon  of  the  Centaur  ever  since  he  was 
first  devised,  and  in  this  case  he  has  drawn 
his  bow  with  effect;  the  foremost  of  the 
pursuing  horses  has  a  torturing  wound  in 
the  neck  and  rears  and  seems  to  scream  with 
pain,  while  his  eager  rider  still  hopes  and 
strives  to  drag  him  forward  in  the  pursuit. 

[58] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

Or,  again,  a  very  modern  picture  indeed 
is  Klinger's  print,  "The  Interview."  Here 
a  villa  is  shown  by  strong  moonlight,  and  a 
couple  who  have  met  on  the  perron,  their 
conversation  interrupted  by  the  bullet  of 
the  jealous  overlooker  at  the  window  above. 
The  stiff  legs  in  trousers,  the  light  stuff  of 
which  droops  away  from  them,  are  all  that 
we  see,  clearly,  of  the  dead  body;  and  much 
is  made  of  the  contrast  between  that  detail 
and  the  gesture  of  the  frightened  and  ago- 
nized woman. 

It  seems  that  a  very  lofty  style  of  com- 
position is  incompatible  with  such  narration 
as  this.  At  least  the  artist  who  invariably 
resorts  to  the  dignified  study  of  form  and 
color,  such  as  was  known  to  his  predeces- 
sors, will  never  take  up  such  a  subject;  he 
will,  like  the  Dutchmen,  like  the  Italians, 
like  the  Spaniards  of  old  time,  paint  scenes 
of  yesterday,  to-day,  and  forever,  not  pro- 
posing narrative  or  exciting  incident  at  all  in 
any  part  of  his  theme. 


[59] 


LECTURE  II. 

MODERN  JUDGED  BY  ANCIENT  ART 
DECORATIVE  EFFECTS' 

In  dealing  with  art  that  is  not  prima- 
rily representative  of  nature  or  descriptive 
of  human  sentiment,  we  are  troubled  by  a 
curious  defect  in  the  English  terminology  — 
we  have  but  one  word  for  such  art  as  that  in 
all  its  differing  manifestations.  If  we  try 
to  express  in  words  the  main  difference  be- 
tween Italian  painting  of  the  sixteenth 
century  and  ours  of  to-day,  it  is  found  per- 
haps in  the  great  and  splendid  character 
of  the  Italian  designs.  If  we  try  to  ex- 
plain in  words  why  we  admire  Dutch  land- 
scape-painting, it  is  found  that  what  we 
admire  is  the  simple  dignity  of  the  small, 
grave,  subdued  compositions.  If  we  try  to 
discover  why  we  love  Greek  relief  sculpture 
so  supremely,  it  is  found  that  what  we  love 
in  it  is  the  quiet  charm  of  the  thing.  The 

1  Delivered  April  14,  1904,  at  Fullerton  Memorial  Hall,  The  Art  Institute  of 
Chicago. 

[60] 


MARBLE  FIGURE  IN  CATHEDRAL  OF  FLORENCE, 
BY  LUCA   DELLA   ROBBIA 


LECTURE  II.    FIGURE  i 


T\V()  OF  THE   HKON/K   FKiURES  GROUPED  ABOUT  THE  TOMB 
OF  THE   EMPEROR   MAXIMILIAN   I,  AT   INNSBRUCK 


LECTUKK  II.    FK;I'RK  2 


U     := 

O   Q 
U    - 


O  « 

H  c 

<  4) 

O  £ 

0  O 

u. 

w  - 

1  .£ 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

question  as  to  whether  it  represents  accu- 
rately anything  in  nature  is  not  a  serious 
question.  The  artist  only  knows  how  in 
his  loftiest  flights  of  thought  he  had  steadied 
himself  by  constant  reference  to  nature; 
that  is  to  say,  to  the  great  exemplar  to 
which  all  our  artistic  ideas  are  referred,  as 
they  have  been  drawn  thence.  It  is  not 
for  the  student  to  ask  whether  there  is  any- 
thing of  nature  in  the  composition  or  not; 
what  he  finds  is  the  lovely,  the  stately,  the 
simple,  and  touching  result.  Now  this  side 
of  art  is  the  decorative  side,  and  we  have 
but  the  one  noun  substantive  "  decoration  " 
and  that  one  qualifying  term  "decorative" 
to  apply  alike  to  the  Venus  of  Milo  and  to 
a  small  and  simple  painted  vase.  The  ar- 
tistic side  of  art  is  the  decorative  side,  and 
we  have  no  other  phrase  than  that.  There- 
fore, if  our  subject  to-night  is  Decorative 
Art,  we  may  include  in  it  everything  elab- 
orate and  simple  —  everything  which  has 
been  the  result  of  human  thought  and 
human  toil  applied  artistically.  The  only 
distinction  we  can  make  is  this:  that  the 

[61] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

work  of  art  which  takes  the  least  from 
nature  in  a  direct  way  is  the  more  purely 
decorative,  and  is  more  obviously  our  theme 
to-night.  Thus  the  kneeling  angel  in  the 
sacristy  of  the  Cathedral  of  Florence  and 
ascribed  to  Luca  della  Robbia  (Fig.  i),  is 
evidently  intended  for  an  ornament  of  the 
shrine  more  than  for  any  other  purpose. 
The  angel  is  a  candle-bearer;  you  see  he 
carries  a  pricket  candlestick,  all,  with  him- 
self, cut  out  of  one  block  of  marble,  and 
the  whole  set  upon  a  base  inlaid  with  black 
marble  in  the  spirit  of  the  exterior  decora- 
tions of  the  same  mighty  church.  The  six 
bronze  statues  in  the  National  Museum  at 
Naples,  which  represent  young  women  in 
stately  and  graceful  postures,  and  which  we 
may  consider  to  have  represented  ceremo- 
nial dancers,  were  found  under  the  portico 
in  the  middle  of  one  side  of  that  famous 
villa  at  Herculaneum,  from  which  so  much 
that  is  precious  and  so  much  that  is  other- 
ways  unknown  in  ancient  art  has  been 
extracted.  They  stood  there  side  by  side, 
three  and  three,  as  they  now  stand  in  the 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

Hall  of  the  Greater  Bronzes  in  Naples  City. 
One  is  adjusting  her  chiton  at  the  right 
shoulder,  for  there  the  clasp  or  the  pin  had 
threatened  to  give  way.  One  lady  is  hand- 
ling her  very  ample  folds  preparatory,  as  it 
seems,  to  striking  a  more  notable  pose.  The 
figure  in  the  middle  between  these  two  is 
making  one  hardly  knows  what  gesture 
toward  her  head,  as  if  suggesting  the  pla- 
cing there  of  a  crown  or  a  wreath.  They 
are  all  engaged  in  that  stately  posturing 
which  the  Greeks  called  the  dance.  By  the 
common  consent  of  archaeologists  these  fig- 
ures are  of  pure,  and  even  of  early,  Greek 
type.  Another  group  of  three  stands  oppo- 
site them  now  as  it  stood  opposite  them 
before  the  eruption  of  the  year  79,  only 
that  it  was  in  the  colonnaded  garden  of  the 
villa  that  they  stood  of  old. 

Well,  that  was  a  Greco-Roman  idea  of 
decorative  art,  that  grandiose  ordering  of 
piece  after  piece  of  stately  and  costly  char- 
acter. The  Parthenon  had  no  carving,  no 
architectural  sculpture  in  the  usual  sense, 
but  only  sculpture  of  fully  realized  human 

[63] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

subject;  and  in  like  manner  the  way,  as  the 
Greeks  thought,  to  make  a  truly  decorative 
figure,  is  the  one  which,  now  in  the  twen- 
tieth century,  we  are  reviving  in  a  sense  in 
the  setting  up  of  statues  posed  and  draped 
in  such  a  way  as  to  fit  the  location. 

Or,  to  leap  over  some  centuries  of  time 
and  a  vast  chasm  of  discord  and  separation 
in  spiritual  purpose,  consider  these  portraits 
of  two  of  the  ladies  who  stand  around  the 
tomb  of  Maximilian  I.  in  the  church  at  Inns- 
bruck. You  will  remember  the  King  Ar- 
thur who  is  so  admired  as  the  most  mighty 
of  the  warriors  there,  for  all  his  graceful 
form  and  bearing:  well,  these  (Fig.  2)  are 
two  of  the  women  who  go  to  make  up  the 
great  array  of  his  martial  and  princely  sup- 
porters. They  are  bronze  statues,  some  of 
which  at  least  are  recognized  as  the  work 
of  Peter  Vischer,  and  are  all  thought  to  be 
by  men  of  his  time  and  mode  of  thought; 
that  is  to  say,  they  are  sixteenth-century 
South  German  compositions,  precisely  equiv- 
alent in  their  purpose  to  those  dancing  girls 
which  we  saw  at  Naples.  It  is  curious  to 

[64] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

see  the  queen  and  the  grand  duchess  so  be- 
dizened with  ornaments  piled  onto  the  sur- 
face in  embroidery  and  in  jewelry  work  and 
wrought  in  the  material  by  the  skill  of  the 
weaver,  while  the  dancer  of  twenty  centu- 
ries earlier  was  so  severely  plain  in  her  at- 
tire. But  that  is  the  change  that  had  come 
over  the  world.  Let  us  see  a  little  more 
of  the  fantastic  and  yet  graceful  art  of  that 
period.  Albert  Durer,  that  great  engraver 
and  passionate  designer,  whose  Melancholy 
and  Knight  and  Death  we  considered  in 
the  last  lecture,  has  left  us  two  famous 
armorial  plates.  They  are  like  book-plates, 
ex-libris,  but  the  prints  are  larger  than  are 
usually  found  in  that  connection,  and  they 
have  never,  so  far  as  I  know,  been  found 
pasted  into  a  book.  This  one,  the  coat  of 
arms  with  the  cock  (Fig.  3),  is  really  her- 
aldic. The  rampant  lion  turned  to  the 
sinister  side  must  be  the  bearing  of  some 
South  German  family,  and  the  cock  with 
spread  wings,  though  not  in  its  present  form 
strictly  a  crest,  must  have  been  Durer's  ren- 
dering of  the  crest  of  that  family.  The 

[65] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

lambrequin,  with  its  fluttering  folds  and 
elaborate  serrations,  is  heraldic  enough. 
The  other  famous  one,  however,  the  coat 
of  arms  with  the  skull,  can  hardly  be  ac- 
cepted as  altogether  heraldic.  It  is  rather 
the  badge,  the  private  impresa  of  some  pub- 
lic man  of  his  time.  The  skull  on  a  shield, 
and  what  allusion  to  him  and  his  is  con- 
tained in  the  German  lady  into  whose  ear 
a  satyr  is  whispering,  have  never  been  ex- 
plained. The  helmet,  with  its  magnificent 
wings,  is  evidently  such  a  reminiscence  of 
the  older  Northern  notion  of  the  winged 
helm  as  Diirer  could  not  carry  out  in  its 
entirety  in  connection  with  the  elaborate 
tilting  helmet  of  his  own  time.  Such  an 
elaborate  piece  of  smithwork  as  that  would 
seem  not  to  allow  of  the  early  notion  of  a 
pair  of  bronze  or  leather  wings  attached  to 
its  two  sides,  and  so  the  wings  have  passed 
into  the  shape  of  a  crest  and  are  represented 
in  that  way.  I  venture  to  speak  of  this 
because  it  is  so  well  known ;  and  those  who 
know  it  will  feel  how  decorative  the  whole 
thing  is,  how  much  the  artist  has  cared  for 

[66] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

the  composition  of  his  details  and  of  their 
grouping. 

Now,  what  have  we  to  show  of  modern 
art  which  is  of  this  general  character  ?  Why, 
I  think  that  this  head  by  that  same  Max 
Klinger,  with  whom  we  had  to  do  in  our 
first  lecture,  may  be  thought  to  be  born  of 
the  same  impulse  in  the  human  mind 
(Fig  4).  This  is  Mephistopheles,  if  you 
like ;  it  is  at  all  events  a  very  skilful  work, 
an  aquatint  in  which  the  great  ruff  is  used 
as  it  was  used  in  the  sixteenth  century,  to 
frame  the  head  and  to  separate  it  in  the 
most  positive  way  from  the  body  of  the 
man — in  this  case,  of  the  demon. 

Or,  we  might  seek  for  more  classical 
feeling,  and  take  a  frank  bit  of  reproduction 
or  imitation  of  late  Greek  thought;  we 
might  take  an  etching  called  simply  The 
Idyl,  the  work  of  that  marvellous  Mariano 
Fortuny,  half  Spaniard  and  half  French- 
man, who  is  not  always  content  with  so 
peaceful  a  rendering  of  Sicilian  motives. 
Or,  to  take  portrait  art.  See  this  portrait 
of  Rubens  (Fig.  5)  by  Hollar,  one  of  the 

[67] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

greatest  of  engravers,  at  least  in  all  that 
makes  up  the  technical  and  the  workman- 
like side  of  his  art.  How  strongly  marked 
is  the  decorative  sense ;  how  much  the  artist 
has  cared  for  the  effectiveness  of  his  design ! 
Now,  in  modern  times,  such  decorative  treat- 
ment of  portraits  is  not  unknown,  and  I  se- 
lect from  among  many  that  might  be  shown 
the  Bracquemond  portrait,  Edmond  de  Gon- 
court,  novelist  and  antiquarian  (Fig.  6).  The 
original  is  a  nearly  life-sized  head  and  a  bril- 
liant piece  of  engraving,  though  hardly  in  the 
first  rank.  But  what  I  note  is  the  singu- 
larly successful  treatment  of  the  head  and 
bust,  the  silk  tie,  the  distant  ornaments  on 
the  wall,  and  the  portfolio  near  at  hand,  all 
to  make  up  a  decorative  composition. 

If  we  were  comparing  ancient  art  of 
pure  decoration  with  recent  art  of  the  same 
kind,  our  self-complacency  and  our  natural 
sympathy  for  the  present  epoch  would  be 
roughly  used  indeed.  It  is  because  of  this 
— because  of  the  weakness  of  the  modern 
world  in  the  decorative  arts  pure  and  simple 
—  that  it  is  on  the  whole  more  grateful  to 

[68] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

consider  how  the  arts  of  sentiment  and  ex- 
pression may  also  be  decorative.  I  am  not 
showing  you  many  Oriental  things,  because 
in  so  brief  a  space  as  this,  one  cannot  pre- 
sent aright  the  essential  differences  between 
Asiatic  and  European  art.  But  this  kakemono 
we  may  look  at  (Fig.  7),  in  which  the  bird 
poised  on  the  scraggy  and  twisted  limb  of 
a  trained  and  dwarfed  pine-tree  is  the  sin- 
gle theme.  It  is  the  earmark  of  Japanese 
art — this  contentment  with  one  thought  at 
a  time,  a  single  impression,  a  single  sugges- 
tion, the  most  exquisite  taste  in  the  princi- 
pal subject  and  surroundings,  and  the  quiet 
relegation  of  all  other  accessories  to  another 
time  and  a  different  piece  of  paper  or  piece 
of  silk.  Or,  if  we  consider  Meryon's  power- 
ful print,  The  Morgue,  showing  that  famous 
institution,  the  dead-house  of  Paris,  as  it  was 
about  1850.  There  are  more  objects  shown 
in  this  print  than  there  are  in  the  Japanese 
painting,  but  there  is  only  one  idea,  or,  if 
you  please,  the  combination  of  two  ideas 
into  one,  the  staring  white  plastered  houses 
on  the  Seine,  far  up  the  river  at  the  Island 

[69] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

of  St.  Louis,  and  the  bringing  ashore  of  a 
drowned  body.  All  the  rest  is  mere  acces- 
sory, ornamentation,  like  the  needles  of  the 
pine  in  the  Japanese  drawing.  The  figures 
crowded  about  and  looking  down  upon  the 
scene,  the  woman  who  is  weeping  beside 
the  body,  the  other  one  who  is  trying  to 
reach  the  lower  level  by  the  staircase  and 
is  prevented  and  ordered  back  —  the  whole 
is  intended  to  give,  and  does  give,  the  one 
single  thought  of  the  distress,  the  hard  lot, 
the  cruel  aspect,  of  life  in  the  great  city. 
At  least  it  is  in  that  way  that  the  buyers 
of  Meryon  prints  have  taken  it,  and  it  is 
not  because  it  is  graceful  or  because  it  is  a 
masterpiece  of  engraving  that  it  commands 
the  highest  price  of  all  the  precious  prints 
of  Meryon.  Or,  take  a  subject  which  is 
near  akin  to  Meryon's;  let  it  be  "  Battersea 
Bridge,"  the  etching  by  Whistler  (Fig.  8). 
What  a  completely  decorative  composition 
is  this,  while  yet  it  is  to  all  appearance  a 
frank  setting  down  of  the  facts  concerning 
the  old  rattle-trap  of  a  wooden  bridge 
across  the  upper  Thames,  the  traffic  which 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

goes  on  above,  passing  over  the  bridge,  and 
that  which  goes  on  below,  drifting  with  the 
current  between  its  piers.  Whistler  was 
wholly  and  entirely  a  decorative  artist,  aim- 
ing only  at  certain  effects,  as  indeed  the  fan- 
tastical titles  chosen  for  his  works,  both 
small  and  large,  sufficiently  attest.  But  it 
is  with  him  as  with  the  men  of  simpler  aim 
and  less  conscious  pose,  and  it  is  so  with  the 
great  realist,  the  master  of  humble  life,  Jean 
Fran9ois  Millet.  His  etchings  of  "The 
Shepherdess  Knitting,"  of  "Going  to  Work" 
with  the  man  and  woman  on  their  way  to 
the  field,  of  "The  Gleaners"  with  the  three 
bent  forms  in  the  foreground  —  these  are  as 
good  examples  as  one  finds  of  the  decora- 
tive treatment  of  simple  out-of-door  subject. 
Mariano  Fortuny,  of  whom  we  have 
spoken  before,  to-day,  is  great  among  mod- 
ern composers,  and  his  work  is  characterized 
by  an  almost  unexampled  decorative  quality. 
He  has  left  a  number  of  soft-ground  etch- 
ings of  extraordinary  beauty,  of  which  I 
show  you  one,  the  Arab  seated  by  his  dead 
friend  (Fig.  9).  For  "Arab"  in  such  a 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

case  read,  rather,  Moor;  for  what  Fortuny 
had  in  mind  was  assuredly  the  habits  and 
the  surroundings  of  North  Africa,  and  he 
did  not  trouble  himself  to  inquire  whether 
the  dead  man  and  the  living  one  were  really 
of  Arabian  stock.  It  is  an  abuse  in  the 
nomenclature  of  France  that  Arabe  goes  for 
so  much  more  than  the  land  and  the  pure 
race  of  Arabia.  But  it  is  hard  to  imagine 
a  more  effective  composition  in  pure  black 
and  white ;  the  original  etching  is  nearly  as 
sharp  in  contrast  as  the  photograph  alleges 
it  to  be.  The  passages  of  gradation,  you 
see,  are  but  small,  the  contrasts  frequent 
and  of  extreme  vigor.  It  is  not,  perhaps, 
the  loftiest  kind  of  chiaroscuro,  but  when 
it  is  combined  with  lines  as  effective  as 
these,  such  sharp  contrast  of  mass  has  its 
charm,  just  as  sharp  contrast  of  color  has 
its  charm,  in  spite  of  the  superior  loveliness 
of  delicate  gradation. 

It  seems  interesting  to  consider  the  minor 
art,  as  we  think  it  —  the  art  now  under  a 
cloud,  the  art  of  wood-engraving.  By  turns 
during  the  last  five  centuries  this  art  has 


BATTERSEA  BRIDGE 

Print  from  etching  on  copper  by  },  A.  McN.  Whistler  (1834-1903) 

LECTURE  II.    FIGURE  8 


MOOR  OF   ALGIERS,  MOURNING  HIS  DEAD  FRIEND 

Print  from  an  etching  on  copper  by  Mariano  Fortuny  (1838-1874) 

LECTURE  II.    FIGURE  9 


ea 

&_• 


'     w 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

been  of  supreme  importance  to  the  com- 
munity, and  then  again  has  been  lost  and 
forgotten.  It  is  passing  out  of  our  knowl- 
edge now,  because  it  is  so  largely  replaced 
by  photographic  processes;  but  it  will  re- 
turn. In  the  sixteenth  century  it  was  in  a 
state  of  advanced  development,  for  the  Ger- 
mans, Diirer  and  Lucas  Cranach,  and  that 
school,  had  made  much  of  it,  had  carried 
out  splendid  groups  of  composition  by  draw- 
ing on  the  plank,  which  drawings  were 
afterwards  cut  for  printing;  and  then,  at  a 
later  time,  the  Italians  took  it  up  and  used 
it  for  printing  in  two  or  three  tints,  pro- 
ducing what  we  call,  rather  foolishly,  chia- 
roscuro prints,  as  if  all  prints  of  any  conse- 
quence were  not  in  light  and  shade,  and 
therefore  entitled  to  that  Italian  name.  But 
such  stately  things  as  the  Sibyl,  after  that 
Bartolommeo,  who  was  called  Coriolanus, 
were  made  then  and  printed  in  black  and 
white  and  yellowish  brown;  and  many  a 
grandiose  painting  of  the  day,  and  of  a  day 
just  past,  was  reproduced  in  this  really  sug- 
gestive if  not  quite  adequate  manner. 

[73] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

The  Saturn,  by  Andrea  Andreani,  is 
printed  from  four  separate  blocks,  giving 
four  shades  of  gray,  evidently  in  fac-simile 
of  a  swift  and  dexterous  drawing  in  mono- 
chrome. And  we  are  to  observe  that  neither 
of  these  is  avowedly  a  reproduction  of  a 
painting  of  some  celebrity.  These  very 
large  and  effective  prints  are  wrought  for 
the  sake  of  the  chiaroscuro  composition 
alone.  We  must  suppose  that  they  were 
meant  for  the  adornment  of  the  walls  of 
dwellings.  The  huge  productions  of  later 
men,  especially  the  Englishman  Jackson, 
were  rather  intended  for  students  of  paint- 
ing. They  are  among  the  most  admirable 
records  or  suggestions  of  great  paintings 
that  we  possess;  but  their  individual  inter- 
est may  be  less  than  that  of  such  prints  as 
the  two  of  which  there  has  been  mention. 

In  modern  times,  wood-engraving  has 
been  turned,  as  other  graphic  processes  have 
been  turned,  into  other  paths,  especially  into 
the  depicting  of  natural  effects,  and  used  in 
book-illustration,  though  indeed  this  may  be 
of  decorative  quality.  Edward  Whymper, 

[74] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

who  is  the  author  of  two  or  three  books  on 
mountain-climbing,  is  primarily  a  wood- 
engraver  of  great  excellence;  and  I  show 
you  his  print  of  the  Matterhorn  set  beside 
a  photograph  of  the  same  place  from  nearly 
the  same  point  of  view  (Figs.  10  and  11). 
You  may  assume  that  the  artist  was  seeking 
a  close  copy  of  the  scene  before  him.  The 
camera  for  the  photograph  must  have  been 
placed  beyond  these  trees,  perhaps  in  the 
glacier  hills  and  valleys  below,  or  perhaps 
the  storms  of  the  last  winter  have  swept 
some  of  the  trees  away.  It  is  very  curious 
to  see  how  the  physical  process,  the  action 
of  light  upon  the  chemically  prepared  plate, 
gives  what  the  artist  ignores,  while  the 
artist  gives  so  much  that  the  camera  fails 
to  record.  The  composition  in  such  a  piece 
as  this  is  hardly  noticeable ;  it  is  so  very  im- 
portant a  theme  that  to  take  it  as  it  stands 
is  everything.  But  there  is  by  this  artist 
another  view  of  the  Matterhorn,  that  is  to 
say,  from  the  Theodule  Pass;  and  it  is  no- 
ticeable that  in  such  designs  the  choice  of 
the  point  of  view  is  everything.  In  the 

[75] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

case  of  a  mountain,  more  than  in  any  other 
natural  object,  except  perhaps  in  a  human 
being,  the  point  of  view  changes  the  aspect. 
The  perspective  alone  will  make  a  seeming 
peak  out  of  a  long  ridge,  as  in  the  pres- 
ent instance.  One  does  not  hastily  alter, 
as  Turner  and  all  the  great  landscapists 
loved  to  alter,  the  lines  of  the  landscape, 
when  it  is  of  such  prodigious  dignity  and 
force  as  are  the  great  Alps  of  the  centre. 
But  there  are  landscape  themes  where  one 
alters,  and  that  without  hesitation,  compos- 
ing indeed  with  such  independence  of  feel- 
ing that  it  is  open  to  doubt  always  whether 
the  artist  had  any  natural  object  in  his  mind 
or  before  his  eye  as  he  worked.  Camille 
Corot  has  been  described  often  enough  for 
us  to  know  how  his  canvas  was  set  up,  in 
the  early  morning,  before  the  stumps  of 
trees  and  the  foregrounds  of  minor  foliage 
with  which  he  had  fallen  in  love ;  and  how 
he  would  paint,  producing  his  composition 
as  he  went  along,  taking  the  piece  of  mid- 
dle distance,  the  trees  and  bushes  two  hun- 
dred feet  from  him,  and  making  of  them 

[76] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

his  picture  in  the  half-light  of  the  day. 
But  when  he  produced  these  etchings  (Figs. 
1 2  and  1 3),  it  is  uncertain,  of  course,  whether 
he  was  so  placed.  He  might  easily  have 
made  these  in  the  studio  from  the  thoughts 
of  the  day,  from  the  bits  which  he  saw  in 
passing  and  could  not  include  in  his  large 
picture,  or  from  the  dreams  of  the  previous 
night.  The  treatment  of  his  paintings  is 
decorative  because,  while  he  set  up  his  can- 
vas in  the  presence  of  the  natural  landscape, 
he  did  not  follow  what  he  saw,  closely.  He 
made  a  design ;  he  composed  a  splendid  sur- 
face of  line  and  mass  invested  with  cool, 
gray  color,  resembling  in  this  the  great  Eng- 
lishman, Turner,  although  the  quality  of 
the  result  was  so  different.  It  is  so  with 
the  etchings  which  I  show  you ;  they  are 
slight  and  light,  but  they  are  as  strictly 
decorative  compositions  as  the  large  and 
famous  oil-paintings. 

In  figure-painting  great  composition  is  a 
characteristic  of  the  older  art.  A  picture 
by  Filippo  Lippi  might  show  how  the 
Florentines  worked  at  a  time  when  their 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

local  school  had  culminated.  Raffaelle's 
Madonna,  the  one  they  call  the  Madonna 
del  Gran  Duca,  now  in  the  Pitti  Palace  in 
Florence,  that  or  another  would  show  how 
the  school  developed  away  from  Florence. 
And  it  is  interesting  to  see  the  way  in  which 
this  grandiose  style  of  RafFaelle's  grew  up 
and  took  shape  in  his  own  practice.  He 
did  not  draw  realistically,  and  then  after- 
wards compose  by  means  of  what  he  drew. 
The  drawings,  of  which  we  have  numbers 
ascribed  to  him  with  more  or  less  certainty, 
are  themselves  as  grandiose.  Any  hasty 
drawing  in  line  is  as  characteristic  as  the 
more  elaborate  ones.  The  student  will  see 
in  jsuch  a  drawing  how  the  strokes  are  all 
in  one  direction,  arguing  perfect  facility  of 
hand;  he  will  see  how  Raffaelle  drew  the 
outline  with  almost  certain  conviction, 
changing  it  only  slightly  now  and  again, 
and  then  putting  in  his  suggestions  of  shade. 
In  the  more  elaborate  groups,  the  drawing, 
carried  much  farther  and  wrought  into  a 
quite  complete  system  of  light  and  shade, 
is  precisely  as  stately  in  its  construction  as 

[78] 


•=       PJ 

5    z 


oa  z 

<  D 
CQ  O 


s 


H  ^ 
Z  3d 

w  o 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

any  painting  on  the  gallery  walls.  Yes, 
and  even  the  red  chalk  drawing  of  two 
nude  figures  —  the  one  which  he  sent  to 
Albert  Durer  of  Nuremberg  "to  show  his 
hand,"  as  you  can  read  on  the  margin  of 
the  illustration  I  give  (Fig.  14)  —  even  that 
is  a  picture  in  every  respect,  except  that 
apparently  it  is  not  completed. 

A  word  only  about  figure  sculpture  of 
ornamental  effect.  If  we  take  a  Greek 
votive  tablet,  a  small  simple  offering  to 
Asklepios,  the  god  of  health,  one  of  many 
similar  sculptures  which  exist,  we  shall 
find  a  decorative  treatment  as  pronounced 
and  as  intelligent  as  that  of  any  of  the 
paintings  or  prints  which  we  have  been 
discussing.  Greek  relief  sculpture  is  indeed 
the  most  absolutely  decorative  thing  which 
we  have  from  antiquity.  No  doubt  its  pur- 
pose was  different  from  what  we  now  see; 
no  doubt  the  sculptor  meant  something  dif- 
ferent from  that  which  we  mean  when  we 
say,  A  Greek  bas-relief.  We  must  not  for- 
get that  the  custom  was  to  paint  the  bas- 
reliefs  in  vivid  colors.  What  we  have  is  a 

[79] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

monochrome  in  place  of  a  splendid  combi- 
nation of  form  and  color  which  the  Greek 
artist  created.  And  so  for  us  it  may  be 
well  to  note  the  way  in  which  the  drapery 
is  composed  and  arranged  in  such  simple, 
cheap  little  pieces  of  the  stone-cutter's  art 
as  the  votive  tablets  found  by  hundreds  in 
the  ruins  of  great  shrines. 

And  now  as  we  take  up  the  decorative 
treatment  of  a  very  different  class  of  art, 
look  at  three  or  four  of  those  wonderful 
pieces  of  costly  splendor,  jeweller  work  com- 
bined with  triumphs  of  the  lapidary's  art, 
which  are  kept  in  the  greatest  collection 
of  such  things  in  Europe — that  which  fills 
the  glass  cases  in  the  gallery  of  Apollo,  in 
the  Louvre.  And  these  photographs  that  I 
shall  show  you  are  taken  from  the  etchings 
of  Jules  Jacquemart,  for  I  do  not  know 
that  the  originals  have  been  photographed, 
except  here  one  and  there  one  for  the 
reproduction  in  color  as  by  lithography, 
and  it  is  probable  that  the  photograph  from 
the  original  would  often  fail  of  its  object. 
Jules  Jacquemart,  you  know,  is  famous  for 

[80] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

his  singular  gift,  his  quite  unexampled 
power  of  reproducing  exactly  the  amount 
of  divergence  in  a  line,  of  curvature  in  a 
surface;  he  is  the  man  who,  more  than 
any  other,  can  represent  a  piece  of  barbaric 
or  archaic  work  with  faultless  accuracy, 
giving  just  so  much  departure  from  the 
standard  of  anatomical  or  other  truth  as 
the  original  contains,  and  no  more.  He 
can  reproduce  without  exaggeration.  This 
curious  vase  is,  as  far  as  the  vase  proper  is 
concerned,  a  piece  of  Egyptian  granite  and 
of  Egyptian  workmanship  which  had  found 
its  way  to  Western  Europe  in  the  twelfth 
century  and  was  there  and  then  mounted 
with  gilt  and  enamel,  as  you  see  (Fig.  15). 
It  is  about  1 8  inches  high  over  all.  This 
agate  pitcher  (Fig.  16)  is  known  to  have 
belonged  to  Eleanor  of  Aquitaine,  and  it 
has  not  been  altered  since  her  time.  This 
cylindrical  vase  with  dragon  handles  (Fig. 
17)  is  of  Oriental  jasper  and  no  one  can 
say  now  where  and  by  whom  it  was  worked, 
except  that  the  foot  seems  to  be  of  the 
Renaissance  and  European  in  style,  and 

PI] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

probably  the  whole  piece  was  wrought  into 
its  present  form  when  the  mountings  in  gilt 
were  carried  out,  as  it  is  asserted,  by  Ben- 
venuto  Cellini.  And  finally,  this  piece 
(Fig.  1 8)  this  precious  mirror  preciously 
framed,  is  Italian  work  of  the  seventeenth 
century.  The  mirror  itself  is  of  rock 
crystal  and  the  setting  is  entirely  in  silver 
gilt  with  an  immeasurable  number  of  deli- 
cate cameos,  antique  and  of  the  Renaissance, 
and  with  large  pieces  of  richly  veined 
agate;  and,  as  you  see,  with  two  vases  of 
precious  material,  and  below  two  busts  of 
jasper  serving  as  pendants.  There  could 
not  be,  I  think,  a  better  opportunity  than 
these  pieces  afford  of  dwelling  on  that 
side  of  the  whole  question  of  old  time 
ornamentation,  which  question  troubles  us 
so  much  to-day.  Our  attempts  at  doing 
these  things  are  feeble  and  therefore 
clumsy,  and  if  no  more  important  con- 
sideration interfered  it  would  be  well  if 
the  state  and  wealthy  citizens  would  try 
to  revive  these  lost  arts  of  magnificence. 
But  there  is,  of  course,  the  other  question, 

[82] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

that  of  the  industrial  value  of  such  achieve- 
ments as  these,  of  their  possible  no-value, 
even  of  a  possible  injury  which  they  do 
to  the  industrial  community.  It  is  one 
of  the  assumptions  of  the  more  thought- 
ful historians  of  our  time  that  the  decay 
and  death  of  the  great  Imperial  system 
of  Rome  was  caused  as  much  by  the 
absence  of  an  industrial  system  in  the 
Empire  as  by  any  other  influence.  What 
was  the  actual  wealth  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean world  of  that  time?  As  com- 
pared with  our  modern  achievements  in 
the  way  of  gathering  and  storing  up  wealth 
it  was  not  great;  and  so  much  was  used  in 
splendor,  so  many  days'  work  was  sunk  in 
magnificent  decoration  and  stately  archi- 
tecture that  there  was  less  for  the  world  to 
live  on.  Are  we  prepared  to  listen  atten- 
tively to  that  cry  ?  It  is  a  hard  world  we 
are  building  up,  a  world  in  which  no  one 
would  wish  to  live  if  it  were  never  to 
change  —  this  world  which  consists  entirely 
of  strivers  for  more,  lovers  of  acquisition, 
believers  in  the  doctrine  that  to  have  is  to 

[83] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

be,  and    that   tangible    possession   is   better 
than  the  riches  of  mind. 

It  would  be  a  finer  thing  to  put  all  art 
investment  into  beautiful  art,  and  none  of 
it  into  precious  material :  and  yet,  although 
that  would  be  a  finer  thing  no  one  would 
be  content  with  the  complete  banishment 
from  life  of  the  arts  of  mere  sumptuosity. 
There  ought  to  be  here  and  there  a  work- 
man who  can  and  will  manipulate  the  most 
costly  materials.  The  rivtire  of  diamonds 
may  be  a  poor,  even  an  ugly  thing,  but  a 
cup  of  lapis  lazuli  mounted  in  enamelled 
silver-gilt  can  hardly  be  poor  or  ugly,  alto- 
gether, and  even  personal  jewellery  is  splen- 
did in  the  hands  of  those  races  who  still 
understand  decoration. 


[84] 


LECTURE  III. 

THE  INDUSTRIAL  ARTS  IN  WHICH  FORM 
PREDOMINATES.1 

So  far  we  have  ranged  over  the  field, 
touching  on  many  points  and  comparing 
recent  art  with  old  art,  trying  to  judge  the 
new  and  unclassified  by  the  old  and  well 
known.  And  we  might  recall  again  the 
proposition  with  which  we  started,  that  if 
there  are  many  disagreements  about  each 
manifestation  of  old  art,  there  are  disagree- 
ments and  nothing  else  about  the  manifesta- 
tions of  the  art  of  to-day.  No  two  men 
agree  as  to  the  character  and  the  importance 
of  anything  artistic  that  is  being  done  in 
the  twentieth  century :  and  no  two  agree  as 
to  the  tendencies  which  have  been  at  work, 
say  in  this  country  since  1865, —  say  in 
France  or  in  England  or  in  Germany  since 
in  each  country  the  revival  of  thought  began 
thirty  or  thirty-five  years  ago.  Do  any  of 
us  feel  a  doubt  as  to  the  truth  of  such 
sweeping  statements  as  these  ?  Is  it  supposed 

1  Delivered  April  19,  1904,  at  Fullerton  Memorial  Hall,  The  Art  Institute 
of  Chicago. 

[85] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

that  though  there  are  disagreements  there 
is  also  agreement  ?  We  are  safe,  I  think,  in 
accepting  an  appearance  of  agreement  as  an 
appearance  only  —  in  holding  that  when 
there  is  apparent  agreement  it  comes  of 
fellowship  in  action,  as  when  the  men  of  a 
certain  school  or  society  or  alliance  of  any 
kind  agree  heartily  for  awhile,  because  they 
are  working  to  a  common  end.  But  this 
is  fellowship  and  mutual  help  in  action ;  it 
is  not,  I  think,  a  critical  agreement  in  any 
case.  Three  or  four  of  us  have  been  taught 
in  one  school,  and  when  we  were  pupils 
there  the  growth  of  thought  was  in  a  certain 
direction  and  we  went  with  it;  and  we  re- 
tain the  set,  the  bias,  given  us  then.  This  is 
not  critical  opinion  in  any  sense  of  the  word. 
Do  not  let  us  despise  such  unanimity  of 
thought.  It  has  a  singular  value  in  helping 
men  to  do  their  work.  We  shall  never 
find  that  the  tendency  of  a  number  of  artists 
to  work  together  and  in  unquestioned  har- 
mony is  a  bad  tendency.  It  is  not.  It  is  a 
condition  of  progress.  No  great  advance 
in  art  has  been  achieved  without  it.  But 

[86] 


z 


C/) 

PJ 

f     < 

n       W  S-M 

3    HC> 

»          P)   i-   Z 

W       p]  Z  2 

H^          9  _ 

•u  *S^ 

n     n  c  o 

G     pi  2  ye 

to       z  K  C- 

w       H  _  PJ 

^   m 

scr 


s 

S 

o 

o 

U* 

P)  JC 

<  c 
p)  n 


o 


CARVED  CABINET,  ABOUT  SIX   FEET  HIGH 
French,  Sixteenth  Century 
LECTURE  111.    FIGURE  i 


CLAY   MODELS,  PREPARED   FOR  ELABORATE  PIECES  OF 
FURNITURE 


LECTURE  111.    FIGURE  2 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

the  opinions  held  by  these  active  artists  are 
not,  on  that  account,  to  be  considered 
gravely  as  binding  upon  their  contempo- 
raries; they  are  the  opinions  of  men  who 
are  well  satisfied  with  their  own  efforts  and 
who  look  no  farther  than  that,  as  indeed 
they  have  no  reason  to  look  farther.  All 
of  which  is  indeed  another  way  of  saying 
that  the  production  of  works  of  art  and  the 
criticism  of  art  are  very  different  things, 
often  opposed  to  one  another. 

It  is  not  as  practising  artists,  full  of  our 
own  plans,  that  we  must  judge  tendencies. 
The  student  of  art  must,  above  all  students, 
be  careful  about  his  prejudices.  He  must 
approach  the  question  as  to  recent  fine  art 
without  even  a  prejudice  in  favor  of  Greek 
perfection  or  of  Roman  grandeur  or  of 
Gothic  energy  and  logic  or  of  Renaissance 
grace.  The  student  may  admit  the  abstract 
truth  of  each  proposition  as  to  the  existence 
of  these  excellences,  but  he  must  avoid  too 
enthusiastic  a  care  for  any  one  of  them; 
that  he  may  not  be  swayed  by  his  enthusiasm 
and  so  ignore  or  underrate  the  value  of  the 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

other,  the  opposite  view,  the  contrary  gift, 
the  grace,  the  charm  which  is  incompatible 
with  that  which  he  admires.  Every  style, 
every  great  conception,  every  embodied 
thought  in  art  has  its  defects  along  with 
its  qualities;  and  you  cannot  have  Roman 
grandeur  while  you  are  pursuing  Gothic 
realism  and  intelligence;  they  do  not  exist 
together.  In  our  own  time  there  is  a 
curious  tendency  in  decorative  building,  a 
very  strong  set  toward  that  form  of  Greco- 
Roman  architecture  which  has  to  do  chiefly 
with  the  colonnade.  It  has  been  noticed 
often  enough  that  this  has  always  been  the 
tendency  in  Greco-Roman  art  in  its  original 
field,  and  in  its  revival  in  what  we  call  neo- 
classic  architecture.  The  builders  of  the 
second  and  third  centuries  A.  D.  were  much 
swayed  by  it,  and  the  great  cities  of  the  Med- 
iterranean empire  —  the  cities  from  Palmyra 
on  the  edge  of  the  Eastern  desert,  to  Lutetia 
built  on  and  around  that  island  in  the  Seine 
where  now  stands  the  Cathedral  of  Our 
Lady — were  all  adorned  with  such  a  display 
of  columnar  architecture  as  we  of  the 

[88] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

modern  era  can  never  thoroughly  understand 
or  grasp;  but  we  know  also  from  a  slight 
instance  here  or  an  irresistible  inference 
there  that  the  Roman  builders  had  a  style 
for  their  domesticity  and  their  times  of 
economical  building;  a  style  as  important 
to  us,  if  we  could  only  grasp  it,  as  has  been 
the  grandiose  style  of  the  imperial  Fora  and 
the  colonnaded  streets  of  Antioch  and 
Gerasa.  Unfortunately  that  slight  and  light 
architecture  has  vanished,  and  while  a  dili- 
gent archaeologist  can  partly  restore  it  from 
the  crumbling  peristyles  of  Herculaneum 
and  Pompeii  and  the  stone-built  villas  of 
Syria,  it  is  not  such  perfect  presentment 
that  the  modern  world  of  artists  can  take 
thought  and  time  to  understand  it.  So  it 
is  that  we  build  even  our  inexpensive  and 
our  highly  practical  and  money-making 
buildings  of  to-day  as  nearly  as  we  dare  in 
a  style  which  was  used  by  its  inventors  for 
grandiose  public  monuments  in  which  time 
and  money  were  never  spared. 

This  is  so  important  a  consideration  that 
we  shall  be  returning  to  it ;  but  let  us  also 

[89] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

approach  it  from  below,  from  within,  so  to 
speak;  let  us  also  think  of  smaller  and 
humbler  things  that  are  designed  and  have 
been  designed  and  may  be  designed :  let  us 
take  up  furniture  before  we  approach  the 
temple  and  the  building  of  ceremonial  and 
state.  I  will  not  ask  you  to  go  back  with 
me  into  the  Middle  Ages;  but  there  was 
a  certain  dash  and  verve  left  by  the  Middle 
Ages  and  impressing  itself  very  strongly  on 
the  earliest  neo-classic  art, —  that  of  the 
fifteenth  century  in  Italy,  that  of  the  six- 
teenth century  in  the  North, —  which  we 
cannot  ignore  altogether.  Thus  in  furniture 
the  daring  sculpture  of  the  latest  Gothic 
had  its  influence  on  the  design  of  the  six- 
teenth century  in  France,  and  such  oak 
chests  as  exist  by  scores,  although  worked 
by  men  who  were  trying  to  be  as  Italian- 
ate  as  possible  (to  use  the  good  old  English 
phrase)  still  smacks  of  the  late  Gothic 
school  of  carving  in  its  panels ;  and  even  in 
the  wrought  iron  locks  and  hinges  there 
are  numerous  purely  mediaeval  devices. 
Now  see  what  the  next  step  was,  and  how 

[90] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

the  men  of  the  days  of  Henry  IV  and  Louis 
XIII,  the  carvers  who  were  working  when 
Dumas's  famous  Musketeers  strode  across 
the  stage,  what  they  thought  of  and 
wrought  out.  This  cabinet  (Fig.  i)  is  a 
rather  famous  one  in  France ;  it  belongs  to 
a  wealthy  gentleman  of  a  southeastern  de- 
partment, to  whom  the  wrought  and 
adorned  furniture  of  his  native  land  has 
been  a  special  delight,  and  the  thing  to 
observe  is,  I  think,  the  complete  subordina- 
tion of  the  extremely  elaborate  sculpture  to 
the  general  design.  I  do  not  one  moment 
defend  the  too  architectural  character  of 
that  design ;  to  my  mind  a  simpler  chest  is 
a  better  thing.  I  cannot  accept  this  sink- 
ing of  all  the  constructional  element;  in 
church-building  or  in  furniture-composition 
alike  I  ask  for  the  evidence  of  the  Make 
of  the  Thing,  not  because  of  any  consid- 
eration of  morals,  not  because  it  is  wrong 
to  conceal  or  deny  or  ignore  the  construc- 
tion, but  because  by  such  concealment  or 
denial  there  is  thrown  away  a  noble  chance 
of  suggested  design. 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

See  how  the  workmen  of  this  later 
school  did  their  work.  Here  (Fig.  2)  are 
two  models  in  terre  gla ise ,  that  is  to  say,  in 
modelling  clay.  The  one,  you  see,  is  a 
study  for  a  cabinet  not  very  unlike  the  one 
we  looked  at  a  moment  since,  but  smaller 
and  with  perhaps  a  more  vigorous,  a  more 
strenuous  design.  You  see,  the  artist  is 
comparatively  indifferent  to  questions  of  a 
larger  or  a  smaller  receptacle  above,  and  as 
to  the  opening  of  the  front  of  that  recep- 
tacle by  its  doors.  It  is  all  one  to  him 
whether  each  half  swings  open  completely, 
one  of  the  panelled  doors  carrying  the  cen- 
tral upright  with  it,  as  was  often  done;  or 
whether  that  central  upright  stays  in  place 
to  stiffen  the  whole  and  to  make  it  a  rea- 
sonable thing,  a  rational,  intelligent  thing, 
with  its  heavy  entablature  receiving  ade- 
quate support.  In  like  manner  he  has  not 
cared  whether  there  is  to  be  a  drawer  in 
either  side  in  the  frieze  of  his  entablature, 
or  whether  there  are  to  be  two  drawers  or 
one  in  the  surbase  here  above  the  little 
arches  of  the  substructure.  So  in  the 

[92] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

Prie-Dieu,  the  praying  chair  with  its  taber- 
nacle above,  the  artist  admits  what  he  must 
admit  —  the  sloping  desk  at  such  a  height 
above  the  cushioned  kneeling  place  below 
that  a  person  of  ordinary  stature  will  find 
her  Book  of  Hours  conveniently  under  and 
near  her  eyes  —  but  more  than  that  he  has 
not  cared  about.  Do  not  suppose  that  I 
deprecate  the  use  of  such  a  method  as  this 
to  bring  a  costly  piece  of  furniture  into 
shape.  Why,  there  is  one  of  our  architects 
in  New  York  who  affects  the  use  of  mod- 
elling clay  for  putting  into  shape  every 
country  house  he  plans,  every  city  fa£ade 
even,  that  he  lays  out.  With  regard  to  this 
I  say  only  that  the  excellent  method  brings 
with  it  its  temptations,  its  almost  inevitably 
injurious  effects.  It  tends  to  make  the 
artist  careless  of  his  constructional  purpose, 
of  his  structure,  of  the  way  in  which  his 
pieces  are  put  together;  it  makes  him 
think  of  his  framed  composition  of  wood- 
work as  if  it  were  a  monolithic  structure 
to  be  sculptured  out  of  the  solid  mass, 
and  as  if  the  question  of  pleasing  proper- 

[93] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

tions  were  the  only  question  given  him  to 
answer. 

Better  must  we  like,  I  think,  the  side- 
board that  I  show  you  now  (Fig.  3).  It  is 
a  late  piece,  probably  of  the  reign  of  Louis 
XIV,  dating  from  1680  or  even  1700,  but 
as  it  is  of  the  far  South  it  retains  some  of 
that  freedom  of  design  which  had  then 
been  abandoned  in  favor  of  a  more  purely 
classical  method  of  design  by  the  workmen 
of  the  great  centres,  Paris  and  Rouen  and 
Lyons.  We  may  suspect,  also,  an  Oriental 
influence  in  those  panels  carved  with  anthe- 
mions  of  semi-Persian  look.  But  what  I  am 
interested  in  now  is  the  obviousness  of  the 
structure.  You  can  see  how  the  pieces  are 
put  together,  and  the  heads  of  the  trenails 
which  hold  them:  you  can  see  how  the 
doors  are  put  on  with  those  admirable 
hinges  with  outside  knuckles,  the  like  of 
which  we  have  never  been  able  to  intro- 
duce in  our  nineteenth  century  design  but 
which  prevailed  in  France  through  all  the 
later  pre-revolutionary  epoch;  and  we  can 
see  how  the  drawer  fronts  lap  over  the 

[94] 


WALNUT  SIDEBOARD,  SOUTH   OF  FRANCE,  SEVENTEENTH 
CENTURY.    JUG  OF  STONEWARE,  CALLED  BELLARMINE 

LECTURE  111.    FIGURE  3 


PIECES  OF  STONEWARE   (COLOGNE-WARE) 
LECTURE  111.    FICURF  4 


KNEADING-TROUGH,  BREAD-CAGE,  AND  OTHER  PIECES 

South  of  France,  Eighteenth  Century 

LECTURE  111.    FIGURE  5 


OAK  SIDEBOARD,  FROM  THE  ORIGINAL  DESIGN  BY 
ALEXANDRE  SANDIER 

LECTURE  111.    FIGURE  6 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

frame  of  the  piece,  even  as  do  the  doors  of 
the  main  part.  You  see,  it  is  a  perfectly 
understood  motive — that  of  giving  to  the 
drawer  fronts  and  the  doors  the  leading 
part  in  the  composition.  The  frame  exists 
for  that  only,  and  to  my  mind  that  is  a 
better  design  even  than  the  stately  cabinet 
just  shown.  "Matter  of  opinion."  Our 
architectural  school  of  to-day  thinks  noth- 
ing a  design  which  is  not  based  upon 
proportion.  To  me  there  is  nothing  so 
important  in  design  as  realism  of  thought 
tending  toward  originality;  proportion  is 
the  easiest  thing  in  the  world  to  those  who 
have  the  gift,  and  is  out  of  reach  of  the 
other  three  quarters  of  the  artistic  world, 
and  I  am  interested  in  securing  that  impulse 
in  our  designs  which  is  more  tangible  and 
more  within  the  reach  of  all  thinking  men. 
A  word  about  the  pots  which  stand  upon 
the  sideboard  (in  Fig.  3).  Ignore  the  bowl 
if  you  please  —  that  is  Persian,  an  enormous 
utilitarian  every  day  piece  with  a  beautiful 
painted  design,  but  not  to  be  judged  by  the 
photograph.  The  other  pieces  are  all  of 

[95] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

nearly  the  same  epoch  as  the  sideboard,  or, 
as  in  the  case  of  the  great  jug  on  the  corner, 
of  a  time  somewhat  earlier.  Three  of  the 
beer  mugs  are  German,  painted  on  the 
glaze  of  a  delicate  faience.  The  fourth 
one  is  of  yellow  ware  with  the  ornamenta- 
tion in  relief,  and  that  I  suspect  of  a  Pro- 
ven9al  origin,  perhaps  from  the  old  mountain 
town  of  Apt  where  they  still  make  the 
covered  pots  for  pate-de-foie-gras ;  but  as  to 
the  jug  on  the  corner,  the  Bellarmine,  I  am 
sorry  that  the  outline  is  lost  in  the  elaborate 
tracery  in  the  background  (a  surface  of 
Japanese  wall-paper) ;  but  you  know  the 
kind  of  thing  —  it  is  of  Cologne- ware, 
which  gets  its  chief  ornamental  effect  from 
coats-of-arms  and  the  like,  which  are  im- 
pressed upon  the  paste  before  it  is  fired. 
Here  (Fig.  4)  are  richer  specimens.  These 
are  also  of  that  same  stoneware  and  these 
are  special  museum  pieces.  You  see  how 
there  has  been  care  taken  to  put  a  scale  into 
the  picture,  by  means  of  which  we  may 
ascertain  that  the  tallest  flagon  —  that  on 
the  right — is  four- tenths  of  a  metre  high, 

[96] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

or   rather    more,   eighteen   inches   approx- 
imately. 

But  let  us  go  back  to  our  wooden 
furniture,  for  this  does  seem  one  of  the 
most  attractive  studies  which  the  decorative 
artist  can  turn  to.  The  simple  chests  of 
drawers  which  are  also  of  provincial  make 
and  not  of  central  design  are  often  full  of 
interest.  They  are  very  simply  wrought  in 
walnut,  with  the  corner-pieces  carved  with- 
out any  special  care  for  what  was  represented 
as  long  as  the  form  seemed  spirited  and  lively, 
with  an  extremely  effective  little  border  of 
sunken  relief  to  frame  each  drawer  front, 
and  with  all  the  metal  work  in  hammered 
iron,  the  handles,  the  plates  or  rosettes  of 
those  handles,  and  the  rosettes  of  the  key- 
holes. Again,  other  pieces  go  farther  in 
search  of  elaboration  of  design.  They  are 
perhaps  of  Louis  XV,  say  of  the  years 
between  1720  and  1750,  and  the  sculpture 
is  strictly  decorative  without  any  attempt  at 
representation.  It  is  singular,  by  the  way, 
that  that  much  abused  rococo  style  should 
have  brought  with  it  such  a  delicate  feeling 

[97] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

for  sculpture  in  solid  wood.  As  for  the 
metal  appliques,  except  for  their  florid 
rococo  design  they  would  command  the 
respect  of  every  lover  of  refined  metal- 
work.  They  are  of  gilt  bronze  most  gen- 
erally and  are  combined  with  the  wooden 
frame  in  a  way  that  shows  the  skill  and 
great  experience  of  the  artists.  But  here 
(Fig.  5)  is  something  still  more  interesting. 
Thirty  years  ago  there  was  a  movement  in 
the  far  south  of  France  in  favor  of  bakers' 
bread,  and  the  families  who  for  two  hundred 
years  had  kneaded  their  dough  in  just 
such  a  petrin  as  I  am  showing  you,  began 
to  go  around  the  corner  to  buy  their  loaves. 
This  was  one  more  of  those  tendencies  of 
modern  life  which  work  against  all  fresh- 
ness and  inevitableness  in  decorative  art. 
We  shall  find  abundant  example  of  this  in 
the  course  of  our  talks.  As  long  as  the 
families  made  their  own  bread,  they  required 
these  four  pieces  of  curious  furniture :  the 
kneading-trough  itself,  to  which  the  hinged 
cover  was  fitted,  and  which,  in  some  cases, 
had  a  drawer  below  —  in  this  case  concealed, 

[98] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

as  it  were,  by  the  elaborate  lambrequin  be- 
tween the  table-legs ;  second,  the  flour-box, 
seen  on  the  right,  with  its  portcullis,  its  slid- 
ing cover ;  third,  the  salt  and  pepper  boxes, 
seen  on  the  left ;  and  fourth,  the  cage  for  the 
baked  loaves.  For,  as  you  see,  the  people 
of  Provence  and  Languedoc  have  always 
preferred  their  bread  to  grow  dry  rather 
than  musty.  "Our  bread  must  hang  up  in 
the  open  air";  and  so  they  put  it  into  the 
cage  and  shut  the  door  upon  it,  turning  the 
key  if  the  housekeeper  were  of  a  careful  or 
suspicious  nature.  I  am  sorry  that  there  is 
a  baluster  missing  from  my  bread-cage; 
but,  after  all,  the  important  thing  in  this 
and  in  its  fellow-pieces  is  the  abundant  dec- 
oration in  carving  of  low  relief,  and  in  the 
solid  mass  of  the  walnut  plank. 

Now  see  how  in  modern  times  we  strug- 
gle with  these  problems.  Here  (Fig.  6)  is 
a  sideboard  made  thirty  years  ago  for  a 
wealthy  New  Yorker,  and  made  strictly  ac- 
cording to  the  design  copied  in  the  photo- 
graph before  you.  It  was  entirely  of  oak, 
and  very  massive,  parts  of  the  frame  being 

[99] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

cut  out  of  three-inch  scantling  and  sculptured 
in  the  mass.  Thus  the  little  colonnettes  are 
in  one  piece  each.  The  shaft  was  turned, 
and  then  the  necking  and  the  base  mould- 
ings, previously  decided  on,  were  turned 
also,  and  finally  the  capital  was  carved  by 
hand.  The  sculpture  of  the  two  diagonally 
set  panels  in  the  two  doors  is  of  birds  on 
their  nests,  also  carved  in  a  thick  plank  of 
oak.  The  only  metal  work  which  shows 
in  the  design  is  in  the  three  drop-handles 
of  the  three  drawers.  You  see  that  the 
attempt  has  been  to  make  a  working  side- 
board with  three  drawers  for  table-linen,  or 
for  spoons  and  forks  and  the  like,  and  a 
rather  large  cupboard  for  bottles, —  a  cup- 
board of  which  the  master  of  the  house 
might  keep  the  keys.  So  far,  as  you 
see,  the  designer's  way  was  plain.  Any 
draughtsman  who  thinks  for  himself  can 
make  designs  of  that  sort,  more  or  less 
charming  in  their  ultimate  results,  accord- 
ing as  his  feeling  for  form  is  more  or  less 
acute  and  just.  But  take  the  more  difficult 
instance  of  a  series  of  book-cases  and  the 
[i  oo] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

general  fittings  of  a  library.  One's  hands 
are  tied.  Even  in  the  country  there  is  such 
a  thing  as  dust ;  and  the  man  who  loves  his 
books  will  ask  that  they  be  sheltered  by 
close-fitting  doors  which,  when  open,  will 
swing  clear  and  leave  the  last  book  in  the 
corner  as  accessible  as  the  one  in  the  middle 
of  the  row.  He  will  ask,  also,  for  cupboards 
below,  in  which  unbound  books  and  num- 
bers of  periodicals  may  be  stored.  He  will 
ask  for  a  case  no  higher  than  that  he  can 
reach  the  books  on  the  top  shelf  without  a 
ladder,  but  as  high  as  that ;  that  is  to  say, 
the  top  shelf  may  be  at  seven  feet  from  the 
floor,  bringing  the  top  of  the  case  at  eight 
feet  from  the  floor,  unless  one  follows  the 
example  of  his  immediate  ancestors  and 
piles  on  a  sham  cornice  with  a  hollow  space 
behind  it.  But  this  he  will  not  do.  The 
assumption  is  that  our  designer  is  a  man  of 
ideas,  who  will  not  resort  to  such  devices 
as  that.  Moreover,  he  wants  his  top  shelf 
for  the  vases  and  statuettes  which  are  to 
stand  there,  and  this  must  not  be  too  far 
from  the  eye;  so  that  he  is  brought  to  some 
[101] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

severe  outline  and  grave  right-angled  uni- 
formity of  design;  and  this  is  the  worst  of 
it,  that  the  design  will  have  a  slender  and 
liny  character,  with  evident  reference  to 
the  edges  of  planks  and  thin  strips  of  wood. 
Except  at  great  cost  this  cannot  be  avoided. 
Your  book-cases  are  a  row  of  boxes  with 
glass  doors  or  fronts.  You  cannot  escape 
from  that  condition,  and  you  will  find  that 
even  if  you  use  two-inch  planks  for  your 
uprights  or  panel  ends,  you  are  still  making 
a  boardy,  boxy,  liny  composition.  We  may 
remedy  this  partly  by  our  treatment  of  the 
mantelpiece  and  whatever  is  combined  with  it 
in  design  with  the  book-case.  The  mistake 
in  such  a  case  will  be  to  make  the  mantel- 
piece and  mirror-frame  of  the  same  material 
and  part  of  the  same  design.  When  it  is 
feasible  we  will  make  that  mantel  very 
massive,  of  marble  or  fine-grained  stone, 
and  the  mirror-frame  a  more  slender  com- 
position of  the  same  materials,  exaggerating 
by  their  contrast  the  hollow,  boxy  look  of 
the  book-cases,  no  doubt,  but  improving  the 
general  effect  of  the  room. 

-  t102! 


K     3      23 

•-       2       X 
c        H 


" 


o     K-- 

•J"    (-  > 

i  ^° 
p; 


WROUGHT-IRON  SHEARS,  ON  STAND 

French  work,  Eighteenth  Century 

LECTURE  111.    FIGURE  9 


COVERED  GOBLET,  OF  SILVER 
German,  late  Fifteenth  Century 


COVERED  GOBLET,  OF  SILVER 

Probably  French,  about  1620 


LECTURE  III.    FIGURE  10 


LECTURE  111.    FIGURE  11 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

But  let  us  leave  furniture  for  a  while  and 
consider  metal  work;  and,  first,  that  aspect 
of  it  in  which  the  hammer  has  played  the 
greatest  part.  And  if  you  want  to  consider 
hammer-work,  then  the  armour  of  the  lat- 
est tilts  and  tourneys  is  the  thing  to  study. 
The  fact  that  it  is  wrought  in  steel  makes 
it  all  the  more  interesting.  Even  to  the 
veteran  student  and  collector  there  is  some- 
thing peculiarly  attractive  in  repousse  work 
in  steel  —  in  that  obdurate,  that  rigid  mate- 
rial. This  suit  of  armour  (Fig.  7)  is  in  the 
Louvre  and  has  been  for  many  years  in  the 
Gallery  of  Apollo.  It  has  always  been 
called  the  armour  of  Henry  II.,  that  unlucky 
king  who,  being  determined  to  show  his 
courtiers  that  he  was  better  at  the  lance 
than  they,  managed  to  get  himself  killed 
by  a  splinter  from  his  antagonist's  lance 
which  flew  through  the  sight-slits  of  his 
tilting  helmet  and  pierced  his  brain.  I  am 
sorry  that  the  exquisite  Renaissance  design 
of  the  relief  cannot  be  seen  very  perfectly. 
But  take  this  suit  of  his  later  successor  — 
only  thirty  years  later,  by  the  way — which 

[I03] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

is  represented  in  Fig.  8  from  the  engraving 
by  Leonard  Gaulthier,  and  see  how  intelli- 
gently every  separate  piece  of  steel  has  been 
wrought  into  relief  by  the  hammer,  while 
yet  the  general  design  is  left  complete  and 
intelligible.  You  see  that  the  time  had  come 
when  men  thought  for  themselves  about  the 
monstrous  burden  of  the  complete  panoply 
of  sixty  or  sixty-five  pounds  weight,  even 
when  the  most  extravagant,  the  most  mon- 
strous price  was  paid  for  the  suit  of  steel; 
and  that  an  active  and  hustling  king  like 
Henry  of  Navarre  desired  to  leave  twenty 
pounds  of  that  steel  behind  him  even  at 
the  expense  of  leaving  some  part  of  his 
bodily  frame  less  perfectly  protected  from 
blows.  Remember,  too,  that  he  is  a  horse- 
man, and  that  when  seated  in  the  war  sad- 
dle the  thighs  are  largely  protected  by  the 
high  pommel  and  bow,  while  for  the  legs 
below  the  knees  it  was  found  that  heavy 
jack-boots  were  almost  as  good  a  defence  as 
the  steel  greaves  bolted  and  locked  behind, 
and  the  steel  solleret  with  its  laminations,  as 
we  saw  them  in  the  steel  suit  of  the  Louvre. 
[104] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

The  armour  of  Henry  of  Navarre,  then, 
reduces  itself  to  a  cuirass  consisting  of 
breastplate  and  back-piece,  and  complete 
articulated  steel  coverings  for  the  arms, 
while  below  the  waist  there  is  no  steel  at  all 
excepting  the  laminated  tassets  which  cover 
the  top  of  the  thighs.  We  have  only  to 
suppose  that  in  the  case  before  us  the  great 
jack-boots  of  the  field  have  not  been  assumed. 
But  here  is  iron  work  on  a  smaller  scale 
and  of  simpler  purpose.  This  (Fig.  9)  is  a 
pair  of  snuffers  or  scissors;  though  if  any 
one  has  a  positive  name  to  give  it  I  shall  be 
glad  to  hear  from  him.  But  the  thing  is 
six  inches  high  or  so,  and  is  made,  as  you 
can  see,  of  a  thin  plate  of  hammered  iron, 
supported  on  four  rounded  legs  with  knobs 
on  the  ends,  all  wrought  on  the  anvil;  and 
it  has  a  handle  cut  out  of  some  thicker 
plate  of  iron.  Then  the  superstructure  has 
an  upright  rod,  which  may  perhaps  have 
been  cast,  but  is  more  likely  to  have  been 
hammered  and  filed;  and  a  rosette  at  the 
base,  which  is,  of  course,  hammered  and 
pounded  into  shape.  Then  for  the  shears 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

themselves;  they  have  been  made  with  sin- 
gular care,  and  after  a  hundred  and  sixty 
years  of  preservation  are  still  in  good  work- 
ing order.  Now,  I  call  that  intelligent 
designing,  for  the  artist  who  made  the 
thing  was  conscious  that  so  small  and  so 
utilitarian  a  piece  might  be  better  left  less 
stately  in  its  ordonnance  than  a  big  cabinet  or 
a  monumental  sideboard  could  be.  He  was 
working  something  in  the  spirit  of  the  men 
who  made  such  silverware  as  this  (Fig.  10), 
although  the  silver  hanap  is  an  immeasur- 
ably more  costly  piece  —  a  really  royal  piece 
of  plate.  But  see  how  fearlessly  the  artist 
has  used  his  hammer;  how  dashingly  he 
has  modelled  up  his  glimmering  bosses,  and 
alternated  them  with  applied  leafage  in 
silver  as  minute  and  fantastic  as  heart  could 
wish.  That  was  the  fifteenth-century  (late 
Gothic)  spirit  lingering  on  into  the  time  of 
the  Renaissance  in  Germany.  Here  (Fig. 
1 1 )  is  another  hanap,  in  which  the  classical 
feeling  has  produced  its  effect  and  has  given 
no  undeserved  check  to  the  fantastic  exu- 
berance of  the  earlier  work.  The  relief 
[106] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

sculpture  in  this  piece  is  as  delicate  and  re- 
fined as  the  other  was  bold  and  dashing, 
and  the  proportions  of  the  latter  piece  are 
at  least  as  good.  But  let  us  consider  how  a 
simpler  thing  is  done.  There  are  beakers 
and  goblets,  sometimes  made  of  very  poor, 
much  alloyed  silver,  by  workmen  who  had 
a  dozen  or  more  thalers  of  the  different  suc- 
ceeding dukes  of  Brunswick  and  Luneburg, 
or  of  Hesse-Darmstadt,  or  of  Mecklenburg- 
Schwerin.  The  princes  of  Brunswick  and 
Luneburg  are  those  very  dukes  or  grand 
dukes  from  whom  the  royal  Hanoverian 
line  of  Great  Britain  has  descended;  and 
I  had  a  goblet  in  which  the  medals  of  that 
princely  house  which  form  the  principal 
motive  of  the  design  are  placed  judiciously, 
and  so  that  the  reverse  shows  inside  the  cup 
as  the  obverse  is  shown  in  the  exterior. 
Apart  from  the  medals,  the  design  of  such 
a  cup  may  be  of  little  worth;  the  artist 
may  have  been  content  with  the  slightest 
chasing  of  the  surface  in  a  design  which 
had  been  used  a  dozen  times  before. 

And  now,  before  we  leave  metal  work, 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

consider  just  one  aspect  of  those  old  decora- 
tive arts  of  Europe  which,  as  I  have  inti- 
mated, are  out  of  our  reach  to-day.  We 
imitate  them  when  we  have. plenty  of  time 
and  money;  but  we  do  not,  except  in  the 
most  desultory  way,  follow  their  lead.  Here 
once,  and  there  again,  we  do  something 
like  it,  but  without  serious  and  consecutive 
thought.  There  is  embossed  work  in  high 
relief  in  those  helmets  exhibited  at  Naples ; 
helmets  of  that  curious  pattern  which  was 
used  in  a  certain  gladiatorial  combat.  One 
such  of  them  is  reproduced  in  a  copy  in  your 
museum.  They  are  of  bronze,  and  the 
hammering  of  the  parts  into  high  relief  has 
given  to  the  thin  metal  a  singular  rigidity. 
You  will  remember  a  similar  treatment  of 
the  metal  defensive  armour  in  the  corselet 
of  that  statue  of  Augustus  which  is  in  the 
new  arm  of  the  Vatican  Museum.  By  men- 
tally putting  that  marble  statue  together  with 
this  specimen  of  relief  work  in  bronze,  we 
can  form  an  idea  of  how  a  Roman  Impera- 
tor  was  armed,  as  to  his  body,  when  he 
addressed  his  legions. 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

Metal  work  of  a  more  grandiose  type  is 
that  which  the  Greeks  of  all  epochs  cast  in 
bronze  and  then  finished  with  minute  care. 
Even  where  the  pieces  are  small  and  used 
in  connection  with  utilitarian  objects  they 
are  splendid.  Thus  in  a  well-known  piece, 
the  handle  of  a  mirror,  this  handle  is  made 
of  a  simple  figure,  treated  like  an  architec- 
tural caryatid,  and  the  handle  is  so  arranged 
that  the  mirror  may  stand  up  on  a  definite 
pedestal,  with  four  little  feet  to  keep  it 
steady ;  and  yet  it  is  easy  in  the  hand.  The 
best  thing  which  the  Germans  have  done 
in  our  own  times,  in  the  way  of  decorative 
art,  is  their  bold  treatment  of  the  human 
figure  in  just  this  way.  Draped  and  un- 
draped  figures,  male  and  female,  alone  and 
in  groups,  are  used  for  the  handles  of 
mirrors,  the  supports  of  lamps,  and  in  a 
thousand  such  ways,  that  use  of  the  human 
figure  forming  by  much  the  most  im- 
portant part  of  the  decorative  treatment 
of  these  pieces.  It  is,  of  course,  evident 
that  such  work  of  our  time  will  rarely 
attain  the  grace  of  the  finer  pieces  of 
[109] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

antiquity,   but   it   is   admirable,   and    gives 
great  promise  for  the  future. 

And  now  see  how  the  Renaissance  men 
took  their  bronze  seriously.  You  know 
how  much  there  is  in  the  way  of  portrait 
busts  and  statuettes,  how  much  there  is  in 
the  way  of  life-size  bronzes  of  religious  and 
profane  subjects.  War  itself  is  treated  in  a 
wonderful  composition  in  delicate  relief, 
surrounding  the  tube  of  a  bronze  cannon, 
which  lay  for  years  on  the  floor  of  the  base- 
ment hall  in  the  Bargello  in  Florence,  and 
is  now  set  up  in  a  more  prominent  fashion. 
I  have  never  seen  a  gun  as  elaborately 
wrought  as  that.  Even  the  knob  or  button 
of  the  culasse  is  a  bearded  head  of  great 
delicacy  of  modelling;  and  the  delicate 
reliefs,  which  can  hardly  be  distinguished 
without  minute  examination,  are  really  val- 
uable sculpture.  But  the  bronze  and  brass 
guns  of  the  wars  waged  in  the  sixteenth 
and  seventeenth  centuries  were  only  one 
degree  less  rich,  and  they  are  to  be  seen 
in  a  dozen  great  arsenals.  The  Spaniards, 
not  generally  of  the  highest  rank  among 

[I.O] 


GLASS  VESSELS  OF  GRECO-ROMAN   MAKE 
LECTURE  111.    FIGURE  12 


GLASS  VESSELS  OF  VENETIAN   MAKE 
Sixteenth  and  early  Seventeenth  Centuries 

LECTURE  111.    FIGURE  13 


GLASS  VESSELS  OF  ORIENTAL   MAKE 
Probably  Persian,  of  about  1700  A.  D. 

LECTURE  111.    FIGURE  14 


REPOUSSE  WORK  IN  LEAD 
European,  Nineteenth  Century 

LECTURE  111.    FIGURE  15 


DECORATIVE  SCULPTURE  IN 

LEAD 

French,  Nineteenth  Century 
LECTURE  III.    FIGURE  16 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

decorative  men,  made  splendid  cannon  of 
this  sort.  I  have  seen  them  in  old  Spanish 
colonies  in  America,  in  the  old  seaside  forts 
of  Venezuela,  Trinidad,  and  Santa  Lucia, 
and  they  all  bear  the  famous  motto  which 
means,  "The  last  argument  of  kings." 

And  the  preparation  for  such  a  delicate 
piece  of  work  may  engage  our  best  atten- 
tion. There  exists  a  drawing  in  which  two 
of  the  greatest  artists  who  have  ever  lived 
worked  together,  as  the  Latin  inscription 
assures  us.  "  Holbein  had  drawn  it ;  W. 
Hollar  made  it,  at  Antwerp  in  1645,  and 
it  is  of  the  Arundel  collection.'*  So  says 
the  legend.  Now,  Hans  Holbein,  grave 
German  as  he  was,  and  painter  of  religious 
pictures,  had  yet  a  pretty  sense  of  the  light 
and  trifling  branches  of  the  designer's  art, 
and  his  drawings  for  mountings  of  a  sword 
and  scabbard,  for  a  buckler,  or  the  like,  are 
fantastical  and  varied  enough.  Some  of 
these  have  been  engraved  by  that  man  who 
was  the  equal  of  Holbein  in  technical 
power  —  Wenceslaus  Hollar  —  and  it  would 
be  a  most  interesting  study  to  compare  the 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

original  drawing,  if  it  could  be  found  in 
any  case,  and  see  how  far  the  ingenious  and 
most  intelligent  engraver  followed  closely 
on  the  design  which  he  had  undertaken  to 
reproduce. 

Now,  it  is  my  point,  that  such  orna- 
mentation in  form,  such  scrolls  and  leaf- 
age as  Holbein's,  or  as  those  of  Henry's 
armour,  such  delicate  tracery  as  that  of  the 
sixteenth-century  hanap,  and  such  bold  em- 
bossing as  that  of  the  earlier  piece  which 
was  shown  in  contrast  with  it,  such  carving 
in  low  relief  as  that  of  the  French  eigh- 
teenth-century furniture  —  all  of  it  —  is  out 
of  our  reach.  It  is  not  because  we  cannot 
do  just  that,  in  any  case.  We  ought  not  to 
be  able  to  do  just  that ;  the  time  for  those 
styles  of  design  has  passed,  and  we  ought 
not  even  to  dream  of  reviving  a  style  that 
has  once  developed,  culminated,  decayed, 
and  passed  away.  It  is  because  we  can  do 
nothing  of  our  own  which  shall  be  to  us 
what  the  old  art  was  to  the  old  men. 

Do  you  think  that  there  are  exceptions, 
that  there  are  some  decorators,  even  in 

[112] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

our  time  ?  Yes,  there  are  exceptions ;  and, 
you  see,  the  argument  is  that,  as  these  are 
exceptions  from  a  rule  which  applies  to  such 
a  gigantic  community  as  that  of  these  states, 
or  even  as  that  of  the  more  eastern  part  of 
them ;  a  rule  which  applies  with  only  a  less 
general  force  to  France,  artistic  France, 
where  the  carvers  know  every  style  and  can 
reproduce  it,  but  have  no  style  which  is 
not  reproduced  —  so  the  condition  remains 
a  general  one.  The  exceptional  work  of 
these  exceptional  men  does  not  help  very 
much:  they  are  not  working  together;  no 
general  advance  has  followed  it.  In  an- 
other field  this  is  not  so:  we  do  not  find  it 
so  in  what  there  is  to  speak  of  in  the  next 
lecture;  but  for  decoration  in  form  we 
have  to  go  to  the  highly  taught,  highly 
paid  artist  of  the  studio;  we  have  to  pay 
him  his  formidable  price — and  him,  also, 
we  have  to  choose  from  among  many. 

Now  let  us  take  another  department  or 
branch  of  decorative  art.  Here  (Fig.  12) 
are  seven  glass  phials  and  jugs,  from  graves 
chiefly,  and  always  from  the  shores  and 

["3] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

islands  of  the  Mediterranean.  The  mate- 
rial is  simply  thin  glass,  blown  into  forms 
and  moulded,  with  handles  and  lips  ce- 
mented on  by  the  voluntary  action  of  the 
half-melted  glass,  with  spirals  and  ribs 
wrought  in  the  still  hot  and  yielding  and 
tenacious  material;  pieces  having  no  orna- 
ment but  in  these  easily  applied  threads  and 
ribs,  except  as  the  little  amphora  on  the 
left  has  designs  of  a  slightly  different  char- 
acter wrought  upon  its  sides.  There  are 
much  larger  vessels  with  double  handles  — 
jugs  —  also  of  Greco-Roman  origin.  Some 
of  them  have  been  found  in  use  as  cinerary 
urns,  holding  the  ashes  of  the  dead.  And 
if  we  turn  now  to  what  Europe  was  doing, 
as  the  nations  grew  more  civilized  in  one 
sense  than  they  had  been,  look  at  Fig.  13 
and  consider  these  Venice  glasses  of  the 
sixteenth  century,  in  which,  as  you  see,  there 
has  been  much  more  daring  work  done  than 
that  represented  by  the  pieces  of  the  Greco- 
Roman  time.  The  bowls  are  cemented  to 
the  feet  or  pedestals,  and  the  handles  are  ex- 
panded into  volutes  and  spirals,  even  into 
["4] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

monsters  of  the  deep  and  serpents  of  the 
rock ;  all  wrought  in  plastic  glass,  at  a  tem- 
perature of  four  figures  Fahrenheit,  and  hard- 
ening in  the  forms  so  given  them.  There  is 
no  doubt  about  the  fact  that  all  these  pieces 
are  open  to  the  objection  that  they  are  not 
coherent  in  their  make,  nor  very  durable; 
even  the  simplest  ones  are  too  liable  to  split 
at  the  points  where  the  foot  and  bowl  are 
united.  But  this  is  not  a  serious  objection, 
for  no  one  would  dream  of  utilizing  such 
glass,  except  once  in  a  while  to  drink  a 
special  health  to  a  friend.  So  the  Persian 
glass  of  the  same  epoch,  which  I  show  you 
now  (Fig.  14),  having  some  of  its  charm  in 
a  delicate  blue  color,  very  often  shows  how 
the  artist  in  glass  is  led  inevitably  toward 
vagaries,  toward  fantastic  combinations  of 
form.  He  cannot  escape  it;  the  opportu- 
nity is  not  to  be  lost.  Glass  allows  him 
and  invites  him  to  sport  with  it,  and  he 
would  be  either  more  or  less  than  human 
as  a  designer  if  he  could  resist  the  tempta- 
tion. 

The    work    of  the    nineteenth -century 
["5] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

men  cannot,  indeed,  compare  with  that  of 
older  times  in  purely  artistic  merit.  The 
nineteenth  century  seemed  to  have  a  differ- 
ent mission  in  decoration.  What  was  the 
lack  of  grace,  what  was  the  clumsy  ineffi- 
ciency of  design  which  characterized  its 
work  ?  At  first  unintelligent,  dull,  without 
interest,  it  changed  in  the  second  half  of 
the  century,  and  grew  to  have  significance, 
but  significance  of  a  different  kind  from 
that  known  to  earlier  ages.  Its  quality,  as 
design,  takes  it  out  of  our  subject  to-day, 
and  it  comes  under  the  head  of  color-work 
altogether. 

And,  as  I  have  not  wished  to  prove  or 
to  elucidate  my  point  by  showing  you  ill- 
designed  modern  work,  take  two  specimens, 
each  illustrating  a  class  of  decoration  which 
the  nineteenth  century  did  well.  This 
group  of  poppies  (Fig.  15)  is  all  of  ham- 
mered lead,  and  it  was  made  in  Rouen  for 
the  Paris  exposition  of  1878.  You  see,  I 
think,  in  this  piece,  what  the  better  thought 
of  the  nineteenth  century  was  in  search  of. 
The  power  of  natural,  instinctive,  easy  design 
[1.6] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

had  gone,  but  there  was  love  of  nature, 
and  a  keen  eye  for  nature;  and  when  such 
a  French  hammerman  as  this  artist  said  to 
himself,  "Now,  let  us  take  out  of  a  great 
bunch  of  poppies  all  that  is  expressible  in 
lead,"  he  began  as  they  begin  who  build  up 
a  great  school  of  design. 

Or,  again,  to  show  how  the  studio  sculp- 
tor goes  at  his  task  of  decoration,  take 
Lanson's  terminal  statue,  "  La  Geographic," 
shown  in  Fig.  16.  You  know  what  I 
mean  by  a  studio  sculptor :  a  man  who  has 
had  all  the  chances,  and  who  has  learned  to 
model  the  human  figure  with  accuracy,  and 
what  we  call  anatomical  truth.  Such  a 
workman  desiring  to  produce  a  figure  which 
shall  be  a  stately  ornament  and  nothing  else, 
may  well  adopt  the  classical  device  of  using 
what  is  called  a  terminal  figure;  and  if 
he  arranges  a  number  of  them  to  set  off 
the  grounds  of  a  great  university,  he  may 
well  treat  them  with  such  attributes  as  he 
would  give  to  fully  realized  statues:  letting 
one  stand  for  History,  one  for  Geography, 
one  for  Philosophy,  and  the  like. 


LECTURE  IV. 

THE    INDUSTRIAL    ARTS    IN    WHICH 
COLOR    PREDOMINATES.1 

In  the  last  lecture  it  was  hinted  that  the 
nineteenth-century  world  (of  which,  as  yet, 
the  twentieth-century  world  is  an  exten- 
sion) understood  little  of  decorative  art, 
except  as  a  matter  of  delicate  gradation, 
slight  contrast  of  color,  or  of  light  and 
shade;  and  this  without  much  connection 
with  form.  Let  us  consider  the  exact  sig- 
nificance of  this. 

The  typical  adornment  of  the  walls  of  a 
rich  man's  drawing-room,  at  least  in  the 
Eastern  cities  of  the  United  States,  and  from 
1880  to  1 904,  would  be  hangings  of  rough, 
ivory-white  material,  embroidered  with 
crewels  or  raw  silk,  in  buff  or  yellowish 
brown.  This  needlework  would  be  car- 
ried out  without  floral  form  or  leaf  form,  or 
the  representation  or  suggestion  of  anything 

1  Delivered  April  ai,  1904,  at  Fullerton  Memorial  Hall,  The  Art  Institute 
of  Chicago. 

[118] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

in  nature.  Or  else  there  would  be  a  hang- 
ing of  oriental  silk;  but  even  then,  with 
all  the  magnificent  world  of  pattern  and 
scroll  and  floral  ornamentation  of  China 
and  Japan,  India  and  Persia,  to  choose  from, 
the  piece  chosen  would  be  effective  chiefly 
by  its  cloudy  gradations  of  color  —  that 
would  be  the  character  of  the  stuff  selected. 
Or  else  it  would  be,  if  expense  were  not 
disregarded  so  entirely,  a  hanging  of  bur- 
laps, to  which  a  rough  embroidery  might 
be  added ;  or  else,  if  there  were  pictures  to 
hang  on  the  wall,  the  coarse  texture  which 
causes  play  of  light,  and  the  changing  tint 
of  the  stuff,  would  suffice.  Or  else  it 
would  be  tapestry;  but,  unless  a  chance 
had  brought  to  the  house-owner  a  good 
opportunity  to  purchase  old  work,  an  un- 
doubted and  important  antique,  the  tapestry 
that  he  would  use  would  be  verdures  nearly 
always ;  that  is  to  say,  those  effects  of  green- 
ery, of  forest  trees  and  undergrowth,  which 
have  but  little  significance,  except  as  fur- 
nishing a  greyish-green  background  to  his 
furniture. 

["9] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

And  this  mention  of  tapestry  reminds 
me  of  the  difficulty  of  explaining  what 
the  American  would  do,  if  he  or  his  art- 
ists were  left  to  do  their  own  decorating 
from  their  own  designs.  That  is  what  we 
have  considered  already,  but  that  is  just 
what  does  not  happen  when  the  man  is  rich 
enough  to  buy  freely.  Then  he  purchases, 
ready-made,  the  tapestries,  or  the  rococo 
panel  work,  or  the  Louis  Quinze  carving, 
from  an  ancient  house  in  Paris,  or  a  coun- 
try chateau,  brings  them  across  the  water, 
and  builds  a  room  around  them.  Even  if 
a  certain  room  is  left  to  be  treated  inde- 
pendently, and  from  designs  made  expressly 
for  it,  the  chances  are  ten  to  one  that  it 
will  be  designed  strictly  in  accordance  with 
the  accepted  rules  of  the  Louis  XVI,  or  the 
Empire,  or  the  rococo  style;  and  this  fact 
puts  it  outside  of  our  consideration.  The  very 
last  time  that  John  La  Farge  told  me  of  a 
decorative  effect  which  he  had  to  produce 
for  a  millionaire's  Newport  house,  he  cited 
with  disgust  what  the  owner  had  said  to 
him:  something  to  the  effect  that  "the 
[120] 


GLAZED  POTTERY  VASES 
French,  Nineteenth  Century 

LECTURE  IV.    FIGURE  i 


LACQUERED  TRAY 
Japanese,  about  1800  A.  D. 

LECTURE  IV.    FIGURE  2 


1MARI   PORCELAIN 

Japanese,  Eighteenth  Century,  A.  D. 

LECTURE  IV.    FIGURE  3 


INLAID  BOX 
Japanese,  Nineteenth  Century,  A.  D 

LECTURE  IV.    FIGURE  4 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

painting  would  be  well  set  off,  for  all  the 
woodwork  of  the  room,  dado  and  mantel 
and  all,  was  genuine  Louis  Quatorze  carved 
work  from  Chateau  Un  Tel."  We  are  not 
now  concerned  with  recalling  the  ways  in 
which  old  designs  are  copied  or  adapted  to 
modern  use ;  and  the  cases  in  which  strictly 
modern  designs  have  been  made  for  modern 
rooms  have  been  relatively  few.  It  is  of 
those  that  we  are  talking  —  those  few  — 
and  it  is  of  them  that  we  say  that  even 
when  the  American  decorator  is  given  full 
freedom  he  will  refrain  from  committing 
himself,  and  will  stay  in  the  safer  regions 
of  soft  gradations  without  pattern.  Why, 
even  the  mosaic  that  we  see  so  commonly 
in  the  flooring  of  the  new  business  build- 
ings and  hotels,  when  it  is  not  a  frank  copy 
of  mediaeval  Italian  work,  is  a  surface  of 
subdued  white,  checked  and  scored  by  the 
little  lines  between  the  tessera?,  and  with 
this  for  its  only  pattern,  except  a  most 
simple  fret  or  zigzag  of  dark  grey  at  the 
edge.  So  with  our  pottery;  and  so  with 
our  boasted  brilliant  glass  —  the  glass  vessels, 

[121] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

I  mean,  which  here  in  America,  as  in 
Austria,  as  in  Bohemia,  are  produced  in  ac- 
cordance with  a  sincere  desire  to  be  original 
and  to  be  interesting.  The  old  knack  at 
graceful  forms  has  gone,  of  course.  The 
old  power  of  embedding  a  beautiful  pattern 
in  the  body  of  the  colored  glass  can  only 
be  imitated  at  a  distance;  it  has  been  re- 
vived, with  a  difference,  and  this  revival 
may  come  to  something,  but  is  only  the 
suggestion  of  an  industry,  as  yet.  The  ef- 
fects generally  sought  are  iridescence,  pearly 
or  fiery  or  in  suggestion  of  peacock  feath- 
ers, or  in  suggestion,  perhaps,  of  sunset 
skies ;  there  are  always  cloudings  and  stain- 
ings,  there  are  never  patterns.  Thus  the 
work  of  that  famous  potter,  Clement  Mas- 
sier,  of  the  Golfe  Jouan,  consists  very  largely 
in  splashings  and  tricklings  of  colored  glaze, 
which  may  indeed  be  guided  a  little  to  ex- 
press the  idea  of  sunset  or  mountain  chain 
or  clumps  of  foliage,  but  which  are  often 
merely  combinations  of  color  without  even 
a  suggestion  of  a  further  significance.  Larger 
pieces  have  the  suggestion  (but  only  the 
[122] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

suggestion)  of  great  birds  soaring  or  hover- 
ing on  outspread  wings,  or  of  a  whole  sierra 
of  sharp-pointed  mountain  tops,  or  of  a 
fir-grown  hillside.  Those  that  are  in  this 
way  suggestive  of  nature  are  the  earlier 
pieces,  such  as  we  admired,  and  bought 
now  and  then,  fifteen  years  ago;  but  here 
(Fig.  i)  are  some  bottle-shaped  vases  by 
the  same  Massier,  and  you  will  see  here 
very  plainly  how  the  conception  takes  form 
in  the  artist's  mind.  The  left-hand  piece 
is  of  a  cold  grey,  whose  iridescence,  how- 
ever, is  golden,  and  the  grey  is  modulated 
by  a  bluer  and  a  greener  cast.  The  pattern, 
as  you  see,  is  a  mere  splashing  of  unformed 
and  poorly  understood  chevrons  and  ovals 
on  a  background  made  of  irregular  spots. 
The  right-hand  piece  is  in  brownish  yel- 
low, again  with  a  golden  iridescence,  and 
you  see  how  completely  devoid  of  signifi- 
cance is  the  pattern  —  if,  indeed,  it  can  be 
called  a  pattern.  The  middle  piece  is  easily 
the  best  in  effect;  it  is  of  a  richer  color 
than  the  others,  and  the  effect  of  zigzag  is 
produced  by,  not  a  continuous  line,  but  by 

[I23] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

separate  chevrons,  each  like  a  pair  of  com- 
passes almost,  the  points  touching  or  nearly 
touching,  and  the  rounded  tops  made  darker 
by  the  meeting  of  the  two  sweeps  of  the 
brush  lapping  over  one  another  where  they 
meet.  Do  not  suppose  I  am  out  of  sym- 
pathy with  these  pieces;  I  admire  them 
with  all  my  heart.  But  we  are  defining 
and  describing,  are  we  not  ?  and  our  descrip- 
tion must  certainly  be  to  the  effect  that  these 
pieces  are  all  lustre  and  glaze  and  brilliancy, 
with  but  little  care  for  the  drawing  of  pat- 
terns or  the  consideration  of  what  nature 
has  to  say  in  the  way  of  lessons  in  form. 

Now  see,  on  the  other  hand,  how  the 
Oriental  attacks  such  a  problem.  Here 
(Fig.  2)  is  the  simplest  and  cheapest  way. 
This  is  a  wooden  tray,  so  slight  and  light 
in  make  that  it  cannot  have  cost  a  dollar  in 
Japan ;  the  rim,  set  at  an  angle  of  forty-five 
degrees  with  the  flat  bottom,  is  a  separate 
strip  of  wood,  lacquered  in  red.  The  flat 
bottom  itself  has  the  grain  of  the  wood 
picked  out,  so  as  to  show  the  fibre,  by  some 
process  that  we  do  not  fully  understand, 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

and  is  then  painted  in  lacquer  with  a  spray 
of  peony  blossoms,  as  you  see  —  the  colors 
being  strong  and  clear,  not  vivid,  as  so  often 
in  European  water-color,  but  grave  and 
emphatic  as  decorations.  Again,  the  two 
pieces  shown  in  Fig.  3  are  cheap  enough, 
or  were  so  when  they  were  made  for  the 
Dutch  at  Deshima  two  hundred  years  ago. 
They  are  barbers'  plates,  you  see,  just  such 
in  form  and  purpose  as  the  famous  helmet 
of  Mambrino,  which,  being  of  brass,  served 
its  knightly  purpose  better  than  these  porce- 
lain platters  would  have  done.  They  are 
painted  in  the  famous  Imari  or  "Old 
Japan  "  taste,  in  dark  blue  under  the  glaze 
and  crimson  and  gold,  with  dashes  of  green 
above  the  glaze;  and  of  course  the  work  is 
conventional,  of  course  it  is  traditional,  of 
course  the  flowers  are  drawn,  not  with  the 
artist's  eye  on  the  blossoms  themselves,  but 
from  his  well-learned  lesson  of  how  a  peony 
ought  to  be  represented;  but,  nevertheless, 
here  is  real  pattern-drawing,  and  it  is  need- 
less to  say —  it  is  a  truism  —  that  the  Oriental 
has  the  secret  of  such  work  as  this.  Or, 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

to  consider  something  which  is  not  done 
with  the  paint-brush, — to  consider  such  inlay 
as  we  might  produce  if  we  cared  to,  be- 
cause we  have  sculptors  who  could  work  it, 
and  some  painters  who  could  design  it, —  let 
us  take  this  cylindrical  box,  hollowed  in  a 
curious,  dark-brown  wood  with  an  open 
grain,  and  then  adorned  with  those  three 
pieces  of  inlay,  and  no  more,  two  bats  in 
black  horn,  and  a  crescent  moon  in  mother- 
of-pearl  (Fig.  4).  You  see  that  the  inlay 
is  in  slight  relief;  that  this  relief  is  a  bril- 
liant addition  to  the  mere  contrast  of  color 
with  color.  An  inlay  without  relief  is 
good,  and  is  capable  of  much  in  the  way 
of  splendid  adornment;  but  an  inlay  of 
which  the  surfaces  can  be  sculptured,  as  seen 
here,  is  a  triumphant  thing,  is  a  device 
which  we  never  shall  exhaust,  if  we  were 
to  work  it,  beginning  to-day,  throughout 
the  twentieth  century. 

Of  course,  if  we  are  considering  inlay, 

we  can  go  much  farther  afield;  there  is  no 

end  to  the  splendour  of  Oriental  work  in 

that  direction.     Enamelling  is  often  a  kind 

[126] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

of  inlay.  The  Chinese  use  such  an  inlay, 
with  patches  of  good  size  and  much  breadth 
of  design,  the  patches  of  bright-colored 
enamel  separated  by  gilded  lines  of  a  definite 
and  appreciable  width.  The  Japanese  affect, 
as  a  general  thing,  a  more  minute  style  and 
graver  colors,  and  the  delicate  little  lines 
of  gold  appear  and  disappear  in  the  play 
of  light  upon  the  surface.  For  all  this, 
you  understand,  is  what  we  call  cloisonne 
enamel,  the  ornamentation  which  is  pre- 
pared by  building  up  a  pattern  with  little 
strips  of  metal  soldered  upon  the  surface  of 
brass,  in  most  cases,  but  sometimes  of  porce- 
lain. The  enamel  fills  the  little  spaces  left 
within  the  walls  or  partitions  (c/oisons),  and 
the  edge  of  each  partition  shows  as  the 
boundary  of  the  patch  of  color.  We  of 
European  stock  cannot  design  those  things, 
we  can  only  copy  them. 

Here  (Fig.  5)  is  a  simple  picture  —  a 
dagger-sheath  —  Chinese  enamel  of  the  sev- 
enteenth century  of  our  era,  the  five-leaved 
flowers,  white,  on  a  nearly  black  back- 
ground, with  little  scrolls  made  of  the 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

edges  of  the  partition  only;  that  is  to  say, 
in  dull  gold  like  the  outlines  of  the  white 
flowers.  See  how  the  artist  has  combined 
his  blossoms  to  make  them  adapt  them- 
selves to  the  tapering  form  of  the  scabbard ; 
a  clump  of  three,  then  two  set  thwartwise, 
then  another  clump  of  three  more,  packed 
together  so  as  to  get  into  the  narrowing 
space;  then  another  pair  set  diagonally,  in 
order  that  both  flowers  may  be  seen,  and 
again,  a  pair  set  longwise  of  the  sheath,  and 
finally,  one  to  fill  up  the  point.  That  is 
the  rough  and  commonplace  Chinese  way 
of  doing  it.  And  the  people  who  were 
capable  of  that  art,  and  are  capable  of  it 
now  for  all  we  know,  are  the  people  that 
Europe  is  hustling  into  corners  because  they 
(the  Chinese)  have  not  perfected  their  mil- 
itary organization !  The  Chinaman  hates 
and  despises  war. 

But  here  is  set  up,  in  contrast  to  the 
Chinese  dagger-sheath,  a  piece  of  work  in- 
spired by  that  tradition  which  is  the  most 
warlike  of  all  traditions.  This  is  Arab 
work,  done  by  the  Moslems  in  northern 
[128] 


CHINESE  ENAMELLED  SCABBARD;     INDIAN  STEEL  WEAPON, 
DAMASCENED  IN  GOLD;   SMALL  JAPANESE  BRONZE  VASE 

LECTURE  IV.    FIGURE  5 


TOP  OF  BOX,  INLAID  LACQUER 
Japanese,  about  1700  A.  D. 

LP.CTURE  IV.    FIC.URE  6 


ENAMELLED  POTTERY 

French,  Eighteenth  Century 

LECTURE  IV.    FIGURE  7 


LAVABO,  SANTA   MARIA  NOVELLA,  FLORENCE 
LECTURE  IV.    FIGURE  12 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

India,  damascening  in  gold  on  black  iron. 
In  passing,  we  may  allude  to  the  fortunate 
possession  by  the  Arabic-speaking  people, 
as  also  by  the  Chinese  and  their  fellows 
of  the  far  Orient,  of  a  system  of  written 
characters  which  are  beautiful  in  themselves. 
It  is  easy  to  see  that  it  is  of  immeasurable 
benefit  to  the  decorative  arts  in  Japan,  in 
China,  and  in  the  Moslem  East,  that  their 
written  characters,  which  replace  the  letters 
of  our  alphabet,  are  capable  of  such  ex- 
quisite treatment. 

And  yet,  as  you  will  hear  on  every  side 
that  the  modern  taste  for  the  vapors  and 
the  clouds,  for  the  gradations  unlimited  by 
outlines,  and  the  combinations  of  color 
without  shape,  are  largely  inspired  by  Jap- 
anese example — and  as  that  is  true,  not  to  be 
denied  —  let  us  consider  the  way  in  which 
the  Japanese  use  that  cloudy  effect  of  theirs. 
Here  (Fig.  6)  is  a  top  of  a  box,  about  four- 
teen inches  long,  a  very  precious  piece  of 
old  lacquer.  All  of  the  five-lobed  blossoms 
of  that  tree  are  in  silver-foil,  in  the  metal 
itself,  cut  out,  and  then  inlaid  in  and 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

cemented  down  by  the  lacquer;  and  the 
moon  also  is  a  real  silver  crescent.  All 
the  branches  and  leaves  are  in  painted 
lacquer,  the  sprinkle  which  fills  up  so  much 
of  the  background  is  in  gold,  and,  as  you 
see,  the  whole  effect  is  pale  and  in  high 
light.  Now,  why  are  these  clouds  intro- 
duced? For  you  see  they  are  clouds  — 
the  suggestion  of  the  long  bands  of  the 
vapor  which  fills  the  evening  sky  is  unmis- 
takable. Their  intellectual  purpose  here  is 
to  suggest,  I  think,  that  the  flowering  tree  is 
high  on  the  mountain  side.  That  intellec- 
tual suggestion  is,  however,  of  but  little 
importance  to  the  designer.  He  desired 
the  bands  of  grey  across  the  deep-black, 
star-strewn  background,  in  order  to  give 
horizontality  to  his  composition,  and  to  re- 
mind you  that  this  tree,  the  root  of  which 
is  not  visible,  nor  even  the  trunk,  and 
which  seems  to  float  in  the  air,  is  really 
rooted  in  Mother  Earth,  and  is  a  part  of 
that  low,  level,  long-drawn-out  panorama 
which  we  will  call  external  nature.  The 
disposition  to  use  soft  gradations  of  color, 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

without  determinate  outline,  is  as  true  in 
Japanese  lacquer  workmen  and  silk  man- 
ufacturers, water-color  artists  and  metal 
workers,  as  in  the  paintings  of  the  great 
Turner.  It  is  plainly  an  important  part  of 
their  artistic  outfit,  as  is  their  strong  inclina- 
tion to  use  browns  and  greys  and  dulled 
gold  where  the  Chinamen  would  prefer  to 
use  strong,  pure  blue  and  crimson,  green 
and  imperial  yellow.  We  accept  it  to  the 
full,  only  we  are  not  to  forget  that  the  Jap- 
anese use  that  as  part  of  a  great  decorative 
system  —  of  which  Europe  can  have  but  a 
faint  idea  —  a  living  art,  in  which  the  out- 
lined pattern,  the  firm  and  unmistakable 
diaper,  the  perfect  distribution  of  spots,  is 
an  every-day  matter,  a  thing  in  which  they 
always  succeed. 

Now  let  us  consider  some  cases  in  which 
the  Europeans  of  better  times  than  ours  tried 
their  hand  at  adornment  in  color.  Glass 
vases  of  Venetian  work  in  dark  blue  glass 
were  sometimes  adorned  with  the  enamelled 
pattern  in  white  and  red,  spotted,  as  it  were, 
all  over  it.  And  let  us  remember  that 

['3'] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

this  enamelling  has  not  been  done  by  the 
cloisonne  process,  with  firmly  set  gilded  par- 
titions to  hold  it  in  place,  but  is  applied  like 
paint  with  a  brush  upon  the  already  glassy 
surface,  and  then  fired  that  it  may  be  fixed 
forever  in  that  place.  In  other  words,  this 
enamelling  is  akin  to  and  exactly  equivalent 
to  the  painting  on  the  glaze  of  porcelain  or 
fine  earthenware.  We  cannot  refuse  to  ad- 
mit the  presence  of  a  strong  Persian  influence 
in  this  decoration ;  the  coloration  as  well  as 
the  shape  suggests  that,  and  we  are  not  likely 
to  forget  that  the  Venetians  in  the  sixteenth 
century  had  close  affiliations  with  the  nearest 
East.  So  the  French  pottery  of  the  six- 
teenth century  (the  great  round  platters)  is 
entirely  glazed  with  bluish  white,  and  the 
pattern  is  painted  in  a  darker  and  rather  dull 
blue  directly  on  the  ground.  Certainly  the 
scrollwork  is  never  equal  in  beauty  to  that 
which  an  Oriental  would  have  done  under 
the  same  conditions,  but  it  is  perfectly  well 
applied  to  the  dish,  both  to  the  raised  rim 
or  marly  and  to  the  bottom  of  the  piece. 
Here  (Fig.  7)  is  what  the  French  were 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

doing  in  their  exquisite  faience,  at  a  still 
later  time,  a  hundred  years  later  indeed. 
The  two  pieces  on  the  left  are,  as  I  think, 
of  Moustiers  ware;  they  were  bought  in 
Marseilles;  and  at  that  time,  twenty  years 
ago,  pieces  of  southern  manufacture  could 
still  be  had  cheap.  They  seem  to  have  been 
made  in  that  little  town  of  Moustiers-Sainte- 
Marie  or  Moustiers-la-Reine,  for  it  is  known 
by  both  names.  These  on  the  right  are,  I 
suppose,  of  Nevers.  They  are  altogether  of 
the  first  half  of  the  eighteenth  century ;  the 
right-hand  piece  entirely  in  orange-brown, 
while  the  others,  especially  the  one  on  the 
left,  are  much  more  elaborately  adorned  with 
a  thin  outline  of  that  same  orange  color,  and 
this  filled  in  with  red  and  blue,  not  very 
vivid,  but  intelligible  and  decided  patches 
of  uncompromising  color.  I  have  never 
seen  inexpensive  glazed  pottery  more  beau- 
tiful in  color  effect  than  this. 

Of  course  this  inquiry  might  be  carried 
on  indefinitely.  There  is  no  limit,  absolutely 
none,  to  the  stock  we  might  draw  upon, 
the  stock  of  beautiful  decorations  of  the 

['33] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

Renaissance  and  the  Middle  Ages  in  Europe, 
of  the  Moslem  for  eight  centuries,  and  the 
farther  East  for  twice  as  long  a  lapse  of  time. 
But  we  have  to  consider  a  more  elaborate 
application  of  color  design,  and,  first,  some 
of  that  furniture  which  two  or  three  modern 
Englishmen  have  painted,  with  their  whole 
hearts  in  their  work.  The  firm  of  Morris, 
Marshall,  Faulkner  &  Co.  was  established 
in  London  about  1865,  for  the  purpose  of 
producing  just  such  pieces  as  I  wish  to  show 
you,  as  well  as  decorative  stuffs  and  glass  for 
church  windows  and  the  like;  but  it  soon  dis- 
appeared in  the  business  of  William  Morris 
himself.  That  work  by  William  Morris  I 
will  not  ask  you  to  admire.  It  is  the  re- 
sult of  immeasurable  energy,  industry,  sym- 
pathy, and  a  noble  ambition,  but  in  the 
hands  of  a  man  who,  I  think,  was  not  by 
nature  a  strong  designer.  But  in  the  hands 
of  a  man  who  really  could  design,  namely 
William  Burges,  the  architect  and  collector, 
the  style  took  shape;  and  there  was  made 
some  English  furniture  which  cannot  have 
been  surpassed,  even  when,  under  the  Byzan- 

[•34] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

tine  emperors,  color  and  color  patterns  were 
the  chosen  ornamentations  for  buildings  and 
their  contents  alike,  for  dresses  and  armor, 
for  everything  to  which  man  set  his  hand. 
Little  is  accessible  to  us  of  that  ancient 
Byzantine  magnificence,  but  by  one  or  two 
workmen  in  the  modern  world  some  part  of 
its  spirit  has  been  preserved  and  restored; 
and  those  cabinets  in  Burges's  house  are  so 
exceptional  and  yet  so  exactly  what  we  need 
to  have  a  try  at  in  order  that  something  of 
our  own  may  develop  out  of  that  style,  that 
we  must  pause  for  a  moment  to  look  at  one 
of  them.  This  (Fig.  8)  is  a  cabinet,  serv- 
ing as  escritoire  —  open,  with  its  books 
tumbled  down  and  its  papers  showing  as 
they  are  piled  loosely  into  the  pigeon-holes. 
There  is  a  portrait  of  Chaucer  in  the  quatre- 
foil  at  the  top,  and  portraits  of  friends  of  the 
owner  on  the  inside  of  the  door  which  is 
swung  open.  And  now  I  show  you  (Fig.  9) 
the  same  piece  with  the  doors  closed,  and 
you  see  how  on  the  outer  or  under  side  of 
the  great  door  which  makes  the  writing- 
desk  when  it  is  lowered,  there  is  a  stately 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

composition  of  human  society  —  the  king 
with  the  warrior  on  his  right  and  the  bishop 
on  his  left,  the  husbandman  on  the  more 
distant  right,  the  merchant  on  the  farther 
left.  I  will  not  dwell  upon  the  pattern, 
because  it  will  take  too  Jong  to  explain  the 
exact  system  of  coloring  adopted,  and  because 
it  is  obvious  that  it  is  not  equal  in  charm  to 
those  that  the  Oriental  knows  how  to  pro- 
duce. But  the  frank  acceptation  of  the 
situation,  that  where  there  is  color  there  need 
not  be  so  much  thought  given  to  form,  and 
that  when  color  is  rich  and  pure,  even  slight 
and  unmeaning  patterns  suffice  —  that,  I 
think,  is  important  as  showing  us  in  the 
twentieth  century  how  we  could  work  more 
easily.  I  do  not  suppose  that  anything  that 
could  be  done  in  the  next  fifty  years  would 
give  us  a  system  of  real  sculpture  for  the 
adornment  of  our  architecture,  or  for  our 
minor  articles  of  utility ;  but  it  is  practicable 
to  do  something  in  color. 

I  think  we  shall  not  fail  to  see  plainly 
enough  how  much  those  designs  made  by 
the  Englishmen  of  1860  to  1870  under  the 


•*>  n 

3  > 

3  g 

:  Z 

H  W 


^  o 


s      3 


»      5 
PI      3 

*       S 


INLAID  PAVEMENT,  BAPTISTERY  OF  FLORENCE  CATHEDRAL 
LECTURE  IV.    FIGURE  10 


DETAIL  OF  VAULT  OF  SS.  NAZARIO  E  CELSO,   MAUSOLEUM 

OF  GALLA   PLAC1DIA,  RAVENNA 

The  Mosaics  are  probably  of  the  Fifth  Century 

LECTURE  IV.    FIGURE  n 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

influence  of  the  pre-Raphaelite  movement 
and  the  study  of  mediaeval  art — how  very 
much  they  confirm  the  opinion  which  has 
been  suggested  already  in  these  lectures; 
I  mean  the  opinion  that  the  power  of  ab- 
stract design  is  lost  to  the  modern  world,  — 
that  we  must  paint  pictures  or  carve  ex- 
pressional  groups  when  we  wish  to  adorn, 
—  that  there  is  no  apparent  means  of  restor- 
ing the  decorative  gift  once  held  by  Eu- 
ropean men,  of  reawakening  it,  of  teaching 
it  to  our  pupils  or  learning  it  for  ourselves. 
It  is  necessary  to  linger  for  yet  a  few  mo- 
ments in  the  consideration  of  this  unpleasant 
truth.  The  photograph  (Fig.  10)  shows  a 
detail  of  the  pavement  of  the  Baptistery  at 
Florence,  that  famous  Church  of  St.  John 
of  which  Dante  speaks  with  so  much  affec- 
tion ;  and  that  pavement  must  have  been  in 
Dante's  time  even  as  it  is  to-day.  The 
guide-books  say  that  the  designs  of  that  in- 
lay, carried  out  and  shown  to  Florence 
seven  hundred  years  ago,  were  of  infinite 
value  to  the  silk-weavers  of  that  early  time. 
And  we  may  as  well  accept  that  statement 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

as  true  or  as  true-seeming;  that  is  to  say, 
true  in  the  historical  sense,  according  to 
which  the  author  of  the  statement  does  not 
guarantee  absolute  accuracy  in  details,  but 
states,  tacitly  as  it  were,  that  this  is  the  his- 
torical verity.  It  is  so  that  we  have  agreed 
to  declare  it.  And  if  you  think  of  it  for  a 
moment,  that  will  appear  to  be  the  only 
historical  truth  that  there  is.  What  is  your 
authority  for  saying  that  a  given  statue  was 
the  work  of  Praxiteles  or  is  a  copy  from  a 
work  of  Praxiteles  ?  What  is  your  author- 
ity for  the  separate  and  individual  existence 
of  Praxiteles  ?  All  such  statements  are  ac- 
cepted by  the  modern  student  as  true  for 
the  present  —  true  until  further  advices. 
There  is  certainly  every  reason  for  a  weaver, 
for  a  designer  of  a  textile  fabric,  to  study 
his  diaper  patterns  in  such  a  school  as  this, 
for,  as  you  see,  that  pattern  might  be  woven 
in  a  fine  material  without  serious  altera- 
tion. The  signs  of  the  zodiac  and  other 
natural  or  emblematic  forms  are  just  suffi- 
ciently suggested  to  give  the  piece  a  slightly 
extraneous  merit,  a  merit  apart  from  its 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

artistical  character.  I  call  that  pattern  a 
normal  one,  the  sort  of  pattern  which  an 
inlay  ought  to  affect;  for  I  think  that  when 
the  inlay  or  the  imitation  of  the  inlay  by 
the  paint-brush  is  sharp-cut,  with  clear  out- 
lines, and  strong  contrast  of  tint  between 
background  and  pattern,  it  is  a  mistake  to 
have  a  design  of  mere  spots,  a  sowing,  a 
seme  as  the  heralds  have  it.  But  when  the 
outline  is  not  so  sharp  and  the  contrasts  are 
not  so  strong,  the  sowing  may  be  the  best 
of  patterns.  See  this  figure  of  a  mosaic 
(Fig.  n).  Here  the  pattern  of  circles  set 
at  equal  distances  and  alternating  with 
eight-pointed  star-flowers  seems  to  me  fault- 
less for  its  place  and  purpose,  because  the 
circles  are  extremely  inaccurate  in  their 
curvature;  because  they  are  not  spaced  with 
geometrical  accuracy,  because  their  pattern 
differs  slightly,  there  being  two  separate  de- 
signs, and  each  design  being  modified  largely 
in  the  separate  units;  because,  finally,  the 
broken  up  irregular  character  of  the  sur- 
face produced  by  the  juxtaposition  of  the 
tesserae  would  prevent  the  pattern  from 

['39] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

being  too  formal,  even  had  it  been  designed 
in  the  way  of  formality  —  a  pattern  that  is 
visible  and  yet  is  not  too  insistent,  a  diaper 
which  is  not  too  exact,  a  sowing  which  is 
not  too  regular.  And,  in  the  pursuit  of  this 
mingling  of  exact  meaning  and  less  precise 
expression,  let  us  consider  the  lovely  eigh- 
teenth century  marquetry.  This  work  was 
applied  to  little  ornamental  writing-tables 
as  well  as  to  secretaires  and  still  larger 
pieces,  all  of  the  eighteenth  century.  We 
will  not  discuss  now  the  plaques,  the  large 
ones  which  are  painted  on  a  gold  ground  in 
the  style  we  call  Vernis  Martin,  and  the 
small  ones  of  Sevres  porcelain,  which  are 
very  numerous.  That  is  indifferent.  The 
present  question  is  about  the  inlay  of  veneers 
which  covers  the  greater  part  of  each  one  of 
these  pieces  —  front,  ends,  back,  and  top  of 
each  upright  escritoire.  This  inlay  was 
made  by  taking  for  it  little  pieces  of  veneer, 
some  of  which  were  left  in  the  natural 
color  of  the  rare,  imported,  tropical  wood, 
while  others  were  of  holly  and  maple  and 
the  like,  dyed  in  strong  colors.  It  is  a 
[140] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

charming  art  when,  for  any  reason,  the 
greater  decorative  appliances  of  actual  carv- 
ing or  painting  or  even  inlay  with  hand- 
work are  ruled  out.  But  really,  if  one 
cares  to  consider  how  color  can  best  be 
applied  to  the  decorative  arts,  he  must  con- 
sider very  seriously  that  combination  of  poly- 
chromy  with  form,  which  is  as  well  seen 
as  embodied  in  the  work  of  Luca  della 
Robbia  and  his  nephews,  as  in  any  other 
work  of  which  we  have  any  knowledge. 
This  (Fig.  1 2)  is  the  lavabo  or  wash-hand 
fountain  which  stands  in  the  sacristy  of 
Santa  Maria  Novella.  Everybody  goes  into 
that  sacristy.  You  enter  it  through  the 
heavy  door-piece  seen  on  the  right,  and  the 
lavabo  is  at  your  elbow  as  you  pass  through 
the  doorway.  The  guide-books  say  that 
this  was  the  work  of  Giovanni  della  Rob- 
bia, and  that  it  was  erected  in  1 497.  Such 
historical  truths  as  these  are  of  the  more 
accurate  sort,  for  the  facts  are  recorded  in 
conventual  records;  although  those  truths, 
again,  have  been  transmitted  from  hand  to 
hand,  from  pen  to  pen,  through  a  term  of 

[HO 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

years,  and  the  truths  are  no  longer  to  be 
accepted  absolutely,  even  as  they  are  stated 
in  the  records.  The  agnostic  spirit  is  the 
only  one  in  which  to  approach  these  ques- 
tions. One  is  free  to  speak  of  a  date  and 
an  artist  together,  accepting  it  always,  and 
counting  on  his  hearer's  knowledge  of  the 
fact  that  he  accepts  it  all  as  approximate, 
and  as  a  theory  good  enough  to  help  in  the 
investigation.  The  decorative  sense  mani- 
fested in  all  that  Robbia  work  is  a  matter  of 
universal  consent;  and  if  I  insist  upon  it 
here,  it  is  very  largely  because  we  have  in 
this  monument  one  of  the  very  few  instances 
of  Robbia  work  in  flat  painting.  The  land- 
scape in  the  lunette  above  the  fountain,  and 
the  tiles  with  a  formal  pattern  of  circles  be- 
low, are  of  the  same  epoch  as  the  colored 
reliefs  of  the  great  archivolt  and  the  still 
more  prodigious  swag  held  up  by  the  Cu- 
pids. As  in  most  of  the  earlier  Robbia 
ware,  the  figures  are  in  pure  white  enamel ; 
and  the  background  of  the  upper  lunette  is 
blue,  while  the  fruit  and  leafage  is  all  in 
naturalistic  coloring,  making  the  strongest 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

contrast  with  the  gleaming  white  of  the 
flesh  and  the  draperies.  The  smaller  fes- 
toons of  the  frieze  and  the  details  of  the 
capitals  form  a  middle  term  between  the 
glazed  white  group  of  the  upper  lunette 
with  its  pendant  angel-children  and  the 
strongly  colored  decorative  relief;  and  on 
the  other  hand,  the  panels  of  the  pedestals 
form  a  middle  term  between  the  flat  paint- 
ing and  the  relief;  for  in  these  the  orange- 
tree  is  a  flat  painting  —  and  yet  seems  to 
spring,  as  you  see,  from  the  vase  moulded 
in  relief  below.  This  is  deservedly  classed 
as  one  of  the  great  things  of  the  Robbia 
school,  and  it  is  worth  while  to  compare  it 
with  any  of  those  great  vases,  those  huge 
show-pieces  from  the  national  manufactory 
at  Sevres,  which  stand  in  a  gallery  of  the 
Louvre.  These  are  of  the  reign  of  Louis 
Philippe  and  of  the  Emperor  Napoleon  III. 
In  these  vases  all  the  relief  parts  are  richly 
gilded,  and  this  gold-embossing  contrasts 
with  the  realistic  band  of  painted  flowers 
and  leafage  in  full  color.  The  artists  were 
not  contemptible  ones.  The  names  of  the 

['43] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

men  who  have  done  the  technical  master- 
pieces of  the  Sevres  atelier  are  recorded  in 
the  roll  of  French  masters  of  fine  art; 
there  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  painters  of 
these  vases  had  their  own  theories  of  what 
they  were  about  and  worked  intelligently. 
They  give  no  shadows  to  their  design,  which 
has  no  great  diversity  of  planes,  their 
clumps  and  bosquets  are  composed  so  as  to 
be  all  close  at  hand,  as  if  they  were  on  one 
side  of  a  plate-glass  through  which  you 
might  see  them ;  and  yet  we  can  see  very 
readily  how  different  is  the  French  treatment 
of  such  a  realistic  piece  of  drawing  from  that 
which  a  Japanese  painter  of  correlative  rank 
would  have  employed  about  a  hundred  years 
ago.  The  Satsuma  vases,  and  those  which 
are  of  the  Kaga  province,  show  an  immeasur- 
ably greater  knowledge  of  decorative  condi- 
tions. Their  clumps  of  flowers  and  foliage 
have  relief  and  solidity  without  cast  shadow, 
and  are  without  excess  of  shade;  but  so  do  , 
their  birds — magnificent  pheasants  and  dainty 
partridges,  cocks  and  hens  of  splendid  plum- 
age, and  the  little  songsters  of  the  bough. 
[*44] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

It  is  a  feat  as  rare  and  praiseworthy  to  put 
life  into  a  perfectly  flat  painting,  wrought 
only  by  pure  color,  as  it  is  to  master  light 
and  shade  and  cast  shadow,  together  with 
color  in  our  oil-paintings.  Do  not  suppose 
that  I  am  preaching  the  doctrine  much  too 
loudly  announced  fifty  years  ago  and  since 
that  time — the  doctrine  that  decoration  must 
be  flat.  I  do  not  understand  that  Michel- 
angelo obeyed  that  doctrine  or  recognized 
it  when  he  was  painting  the  vaults  of  the 
Sistine.  But  there  are  degrees  and  limita- 
tions, and  just  as  the  cast  shadow  is  elimi- 
nated from  fine  work  in  glass,  from  the 
windows  of  the  great  times  of  the  past  and 
from  those  of  the  nineteenth  century,  and 
as,  again,  there  are  no  cast  shadows  in  the 
illuminations  of  the  mediaeval  manuscript, 
or  even  one  of  the  Renaissance,  so  in  these 
bands  of  decorative  purpose,  however  natu- 
ralistic their  drawing  and  however  strong 
and  vivid  their  color,  there  are  no  shadows 
and  no  perspective,  no  relief  beyond  that 
which  design  and  color  give  to  the  mind 
already  prepared  to  accept  a  magnificent 

[145] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

fowl  or  a  cluster  of  peonies  as  a  solid  object. 
The  two  bands  of  decoration — the  French 
one  and  the  Japanese  one — are,  as  I  say, 
alike  as  to  this.  And  yet,  how  different  is 
their  aspect,  how  much  more  decidedly  is 
the  Oriental  work  truly  decorative,  a  thing 
of  the  surface,  taking  nothing  from  the 
solidity  of  the  piece!  How  much  more 
like  the  facts  of  nature  is  the  Frenchman's, 
and  how  little  decorative  effect  he  gains  by 
this  semblance  of  solidity,  of  air  and  space ! 
If  you  were  to  see  these  two  vases  in  your 
museum  this  afternoon,  the  immense  Sevres 
piece  would  produce  a  knock-down  effect  as 
of  the  wholly  unexpected,  of  the  striking, 
the  startling,  the  impressive  work  of  art; 
and  yet  the  more  you  turned  around  it,  and 
looked  at  it  from  different  points  of  view, 
the  less  you  would  find  your  artistic  soul 
content;  while  the  Japanese  piece  would,  I 
think,  never  tire  any  one. 

This  matter  of  what  is  decorative  is,  you 

know,  of  a  most  baffling  nature.     You  say 

that  a  Greek  vase  is  the  most  intelligent,  and 

on  the  whole  the  most  admirable,  decoration 

['46] 


>   G 
q   PJ 


ft   2 


BUSTS,  CALLED  SEVERUS  AND  CARACOLLA 

Roman  of  Third  Century  A.  D.    Heads  of  white  marble,  drapery  of 

veined  marble 

LECTURE  IV     FIGURE  15 


POLYCHROMATIC   BUST,  BY  CORD1ER 


LECTURE  IV.    FIGURE  16 


POLYCHROMATIC    STATUE 

(LAMP-STAND),  BY 

CORDIER 

LECTURE  IV.    FIGURE  17 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

in  the  world,  and  yet  it  does  not  decorate  a 
room,  nor  even  a  mantelpiece  or  even  the 
top  of  a  book-case.  Its  subtile  form  cannot 
be  appreciated  till  you  have  it  in  your  hand. 
Its  ornamentation  does  not  carry.  From  ten 
feet  away,  even  its  color,  its  grave  reddish 
brown  and  black,  passes  into  a  not  very 
striking  blot  on  the  background;  while  an 
Oriental  piece,  or  a  piece  of  majolica  of  one- 
tenth  the  intellectual  force  of  the  Greek  vase, 
affects  the  whole  room  in  which  it  stands, 
and  has  to  be  reckoned  with  in  any  system 
of  decoration  which  you  may  think  of  carry- 
ing out.  In  its  figure-painting  in  flat 
silhouette,  the  Greek  vase  is  of  immense 
intellectual  importance,  and  of  greater  im- 
portance to  us  moderns,  because  through  it 
we  receive  a  far-away  notion  of  what  Greek 
wall-painting  of  the  time  may  have  been. 
But  at  no  time  does  the  painting  of  the  earlier 
or  of  the  later  amphorae  and  phials  reach  the 
condition  of  a  continuous  solid  decoration  of 
the  whole  piece.  It  seems  never  to  have 
occurred  to  a  Greek  painter  of  pots  that  he 
could  carry  a  continuous  frieze  around  the 

C'47] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

whole  body  of  his  vase.  His  procession  of 
isolated  figures,  his  Hercules  bringing  the 
Erymanthian  boar  to  the  unhappy  King 
Eurystheus  hiding  in  a  great  earthenware 
pot,  or  his  Peleus  carrying  off  Thetis  while 
her  sister  nymphs  seem  rather  to  applaud 
than  to  resist  the  ravisher,  may  indeed  sur- 
round a  vessel  without  handles  except  at  the 
top,  or  may  be  broken  only  by  the  handles 
if  they  are  at  the  sides.  But  they  are  not 
continuous  and  wrought  into  one  com- 
position; whereas,  since  the  time  of  the 
discovery  that  a  band  making  the  circle  of 
a  vase  may  be  considered  as  a  flat  frieze  of 
indefinite  length,  the  treatment  of  that  as 
such  a  frieze  is  a  commonplace  of  the  de- 
signer. One  of  the  best  pieces  that  I  have 
seen  of  American  pottery  is  a  Volkmar  vase, 
in  which  a  landscape  study  of  trees  and 
undergrowth  passes  entirely  around  the  body 
of  the  vase,  returning  into  itself,  a  landscape 
without  beginning  or  end,  suggesting  in  a 
curious  way,  in  its  convex  roundness,  the 
concave  roundness  of  the  great  natural  world 
without.  It  is  a  pity  that  the  work  turned 
[148] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

out  by  that  pottery  should  be  so  seldom 
treated  with  polychromy  or  other  significant 
painting.  It  is  mainly  the  interesting  in 
form  and  the  attractive  in  tone  which  makes 
interesting  pieces  of  the  Volkmar  works. 
Decorative  pieces  are  so  very  unusual  in  the 
United  States  and  in  modern  European  lands, 
anywhere,  that  it  is  to  be  regretted  that  this 
remarkable  product  should  be  so  seldom  used 
for  the  finest  pottery  decoration. 

I  must  remind  you  again  of  the  profound 
conviction  which  the  ancient  men  held,  and 
the  Eastern  men  of  to-day  hold,  the  con- 
viction that  sculpture  was  as  nothing  until 
it  had  been  completed  by  polychromatic 
treatment.  The  Athenians  of  the  great  time 
—  the  time  of  Phidias  and  of  Praxiteles  — 
used  polychromy  as  freely  as  their  early 
ancestors,  but  it  has  so  happened  that  the 
greatest  number  of  examples  of  such  color 
adornment  of  sculpture  have  come  to  us  from 
a  somewhat  earlier  time.  The  wonderful 
find  of  painted  statues  on  the  Acropolis  in 
1886,  preceded  by  the  discovery  of  six  or 
seven  most  interesting  pieces  in  1883,  has 

[«49] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

given  to  the  Acropolis  Museum  a  collection 
of  Greek  sculpture  of  a  time  just  previous  to 
the  great  culmination  of  art  about  the  middle 
of  the  fifth  century  B.  C.  Those  statues  and 
reliefs  in  a  few  cases  preserve  the  marks  of 
a  still  earlier  archaism,  but  the  greater  part 
have  all  the  characteristics  of  the  years  500 
and  thereafter,  that  is  to  say,  of  the  time 
just  before  the  Persian  invasion  of  continental 
Greece.  I  show  you  (Fig.  13)  one  of  which 
I  have  thought  the  back  more  interesting 
than  the  front.  Note  the  rippled  hair  lying 
down  the  back  and  at  one  time  gilded.  Note 
the  crinkled  stuff  of  the  garment  which  cov- 
ers the  left  shoulder,  and  again  the  crinkled 
stuff  of  another  texture  which  forms  a  part 
of  the  outer  or  upper  garment  and  covers 
the  right  shoulder.  You  see  the  study  made 
by  the  sculptor  of  the  very  material,  the 
crepe-like  woolen  gauze  which  the  Greeks 
used  continually,  and  which  their  successors 
to-day  have  begun  to  make  once  more.  The 
band  around  the  head,  and  the  outer  gar- 
ment, are  painted  with  patterns,  that  of  the 
cloak  itself — the  himation  —  being  made 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

up  of  detached  round  figures  arranged  like 
a  star,  and  of  two  patterns;  and  a  border 
composed  of  a  series  of  parallel  lines  em- 
phasized by  a  row  of  dots  on  the  upper  or 
inner  side.  The  smoother  parts  of  the 
garment  above  —  the  chiton  or  tunic  or  shirt, 
which  shows  on  the  left  shoulder  —  was, 
when  found,  of  a  positive  green.  The 
picture  which  I  show  you  now  (Fig.  14)  is 
of  a  larger  statue,  one  of  life-size,  and  in 
order  that  you  may  see  the  colored  pattern 
more  accurately,  I  give  you  only  a  fragment 
of  it.  You  have  the  body  below  the  elbows 
with  what  remains  of  the  two  arms,  but  you 
see  nothing  except  the  painted  drapery ;  and 
here  again  the  chiton  beneath  is  painted 
with  detached  spots,  while  the  himation  has 
a  very  complex  and  richly  colored  border 
made  up  of  a  succession  of  frets,  or,  as  we 
call  them  sometimes,  key  patterns. 

Now,  the  disposition  to  paint  statues  in 
this  frank  and  outspoken  way  gradually 
diminished  with  the  growth  of  a  self-con- 
scious civilization.  In  a  way  which  is  very 
hard  to  follow  and  to  explain,  the  change 

['Si] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

in  social  organization  from  the  simpler  to 
the  more  complex,  and  of  social  feeling  from 
the  conscious  and  natural  to  the  more  care- 
fully organized,  is  often  accompanied  by  a 
reluctance  to  use  brilliant  colors.  Explain 
that  who  may  —  no  adequate  description  of 
it  has  come  in  my  way.  But  the  love  of 
color  remains  and  is  modified  in  a  curious 
fashion  by  the  constantly  growing  love  of 
the  costly  and  precious  in  the  way  of  material. 
And  thus,  to  leap  over  some  centuries  of  time, 
the  photograph  which  I  show  you  now 
(Fig.  15)  gives  us  two  of  those  imperial 
busts  with  which  the  haunters  of  the 
museums  in  Rome  are  so  familiar.  There 
are  scores  of  them,  and  one  does  not  always 
accept  the  ascriptions  —  the  imagined  names 
of  the  originals — which,  as  you  know,  are 
inferred  from  the  resemblance  of  the  heads 
to  coins  whose  inscriptions  make  the  profiles 
upon  them  authentic.  The  bust  on  the  left 
is  lettered  Severo,  which  is  intended  to  stand 
for  Alexander  Severus,  emperor  from  222  to 
235  A.  D.;  while  the  other  has  been  variously 
named.  In  each  of  these  pieces  the  head 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

and  neck  are  of  white  marble,  and  the  whole 
mass  of  carved  stone  which  stands  for  the 
draped  shoulders  and  bust  is  of  a  very 
precious,  beautifully  veined  marble  from  the 
Pyrenees  or  from  Numidia,  marble  of  some 
variety  so  rich  and  precious  that  it  may  be 
considered  as  a  jewel  —  a  precious  stone 
whose  units  are  somewhat  larger  than  those 
of  the  turquoise  or  the  topaz,  but  not  less 
desirable  or  less  lovely.  The  work  of  Europe 
and  the  East  in  the  pictra-dura,  the  hard  stone, 
that  is,  the  crystal  and  agate  and  jasper,  is  not 
more  beautiful  or  more  worthy  of  an  artist's 
attention  than  that  in  the  softer  stones  and 
the  metals,  the  marbles  and  alabasters  which 
serve  for  statuary  and  also  for  the  shafts  of 
columns  in  high-wrought  decorative  archi- 
tecture. 

Now  in  modern  times,  with  our  compara- 
tive inability  to  spend  money  freely  on 
magnificence,  the  longing  of  the  artist  for 
brilliant  and  delicate  color  is  to  be  gratified, 
if  at  all,  by  other  appliances  than  these.  A 
certain  French  sculptor,  named  Charles 
Henri  Cordier,  has  made  himself  a  name  for 

[-53] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

polychromatic  sculpture  of  much  less  beauty 
than  that  of  the  workmen  of  old  times,  but 
of  even  superior  significance.  He  has  gone 
far  toward  realism  in  his  desire  to  express 
the  facts  about  the  clothing  and  the  person- 
ality of  races  of  men  more  picturesque  than 
his  fellow  Europeans.  The  inhabitants  of 
North  Africa,  Moors  and  Berbers,  the  peo- 
ple of  mixed  blood  whom  the  French  call 
too  often  by  the  not  wholly  appropriate 
name  of  Arabe,  have  always  excited  interest 
in  the  minds  of  the  artists  of  Europe ;  and 
the  people  of  France  have  a  political  inter- 
est in  them  which  comes  of  their  control 
over  so  vast  a  territory  in  Algeria  and  Tuni- 
sia, a  tract  of  country  at  least  as  great  as 
France  herself.  Among  the  statues  by 
Cordier  there  is  one  which  I  can  only  de- 
scribe to  you,  an  ancient  Egyptian  playing 
upon  the  harp,  in  which  life-size  composi- 
tion the  opportunity  offered  by  the  costume 
and  by  the  form  of  the  harp  itself  has  been 
used  to  the  full,  and  a  system  of  brilliant 
color  is  added  in  what  seems  to  be  enamel- 
ling of  a  certain  rough  and  expeditious  sort. 
[-54] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

The  pieces  which  I  can  show  you  (Figs.  16 
and  17)  are  more  simple,  and  the  colors 
used  are  merely  those  of  dark  bronze  gilded, 
or  copper-colored  bronze,  white  marble,  and 
the  like.  And  this  bust  is  called  simply 
"Un  Kabyle"  that  is,  an  individual  of  the 
tribe  which  gave  to  the  French  invaders  the 
most  serious  and  constant  military  problem 
to  solve.  The  colors  here  are  all  metal- 
lic, and  the  system  is  merely  that  of  con- 
trasting the  lighter  and  the  darker  tones  of 
bronze.  But  in  the  other,  the  decorative 
lamp-stand,  the  very  effective  pose  of  the 
woman  carrying  a  jar  upon  her  head,  by 
the  contrast  between  the  marble  and  dark 
bronze,  with  the  lustre  and  appearance  of 
gold  in  smaller  parts  completing  what  is 
really  a  very  effective  composition  of  soft 
and  suggestive  color,  we  are,  as  I  think,  at 
the  beginning  of  an  epoch  of  polychromatic 
sculpture.  The  works  of  our  countryman, 
Herbert  Adams,  are  known  to  many  of  you; 
and  while  Mr.  Adams  has  limited  his  ef- 
forts to  the  more  gentle  and  cooler  colors 
which  are  those  most  readily  accepted  by 

[•55] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

the  modern  world,  he  is  eager,  as  I  know, 
to  try  polychromy  in  a  more  strenuous 
way.  Portrait  busts  of  his  have  been  ex- 
hibited, in  which  colors  were  used  with  ex- 
traordinary effect,  and  that  these  have  been 
accepted  in  portraiture  is  assuredly  a  good 
sign.  We  cannot  afford  to  leave  unnoticed 
and  unimproved  so  splendid  a  field  as  that 
afforded  us  by  the  application  of  polychromy 
to  disciplined  and  marshalled  form. 

The  subject  of  polychromy  in  architec- 
ture is  so  immediately  connected  with  the 
sixth  lecture  of  this  course  as  announced, 
that  we  will  leave  it  unintroduced  to-day. 


LECTURE  V. 

SCULPTURE  AS  USED  IN  ARCHI- 
TECTURE.1 

There  is  no  reason  for  the  constant 
application  of  sculpture  to  buildings  except 
this,  that  the  building  affords  a  solid  and 
generally  a  noteworthy  mass  of  hard  material, 
parts  of  which  may  be  carved  with  advantage. 
You  will  observe  that  one  main  reason  for 
the  special  glory  of  architecture  is  that  it 
allows  of  such  carving;  shows  it  well; 
associates  many  pieces  of  carving  into  a 
whole.  The  poles  which  support  the  front 
of  a  New  Zealand  chief's  wooden  house  are 
liable  to  be  cut  into  ornamental  shapes ;  and 
it  does  not  take  much  thought  on  the  part 
of  the  half-savage  builder  to  inspire  him 
with  the  strong  desire  to  turn  that  cutting 
and  carving  into  the  forms  of  such  expression 
as  comes  natural  to  him.  If  he  wishes  to 
produce  an  effect  of  terror  on  the  supposed 

1  Delivered  April  26,  1904,  at  Fullerton  Memorial  Hall,  The  Art 
Institute  of  Chicago. 

t'57] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

enemy  who  may  come  in  sight  of  the  chief's 
dwelling,  or  merely  to  announce  the  for- 
midable character  of  the  chief  or  of  the 
tribe,  he  will  give  to  those  sculptures  the 
effect  of  grinning  and  ferocious  heads,  em- 
bodying in  them,  not  so  much  his  ideas  of 
what  would  be  beautiful  decorations  for 
the  purpose,  as  his  overmastering  thought 
of  terror-striking  ferocity.  The  Assyrian 
builder,  preparing  to  line  the  walls  of  the 
larger  halls  and  corridors  of  his  master's 
palace  on  the  Tigris,  will  resort  to  repre- 
sentations of  his  master  or  his  master's  father 
or  predecessor  hunting  —  and  generally 
hunting  some  ferocious  and  formidable  beast 
—  or  heading  his  troops  in  battle;  or  adoring 
the  divinities  of  his  race  or  his  family.  It 
has  not  often  been  objected  to  by  the  prince, 
or  by  his  followers  and  admirers,  that  his 
own  achievements  should  be  recorded  in  his 
own  palace.  That  saying  of  the  English 
ambassador,  when  at  Versailles  they  showed 
him  the  historical  paintings  of  the  palace  of 
Louis  XIV,  and  asked  him  whether  such 
decorations  were  to  be  seen  in  England, 


f 

PI 
<v 

H 

c 

- 


SLAB,  TOP  OF  A   STELE  RECORDING  A  TREATY 
Three  feet  long.    Now  in  Acropolis  Museum,  Athens 

LECTURE  V.    FIGURE  3 


CHARTRES  CATHEDRAL,  FROM  THE  WEST 
Only  the  southernmost  of  the  three  doorways  is  visible 

LECTURE  V.    FIGURE  4 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

"My  master's  achievements  are  to  be  found 
recorded  anywhere  except  in  his  own 
palace,"  may  have  been  caused  by  the  fact 
that  there  was  no  other  answer  to  make.  It 
was  not  good  taste,  nor  in  all  probability 
was  it  any  form  of  reluctance  on  the  part  of 
William  III  of  England,  or  on  the  part 
of  his  admirers,  that  kept  Windsor  Castle  or 
St.  James's  Palace  from  such  adornments. 
The  subject  uppermost  in  the  artist's  mind 
is  that  which  he  will  utilize  in  painting  on 
ceilings  or  on  the  lunettes  of  vaulted  rooms, 
just  as  the  sculptor  is  thinking  of  that  which 
he  will  show  in  the  carved  decoration  of  his 
rising  wall  or  newly  completed  porch ;  and, 
in  the  reign  of  Louis  XIV,  the  assumption 
that  the  glory  of  France  was  all  embodied 
in  the  worship  of  the  monarch  was  the  con- 
trolling thought. 

Sculpture  is  added  to  Egyptian  palaces 
and  temples  in  two  notable  ways.  There  is 
first  the  carving  in  relief  of  some  kind  upon 
the  walls,  vertical  or  sloping,  and  the  rounded 
surface  of  the  great  columns;  these  reliefs 
being  painted  in  brilliant  colors,  as  was  all 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

sculpture  of  antiquity.  Second,  there  were 
the  statues,  which  were  still  in  a  sense  reliefs, 
because  they  were  almost  always  backed  up 
by  the  walls  of  a  natural  cliff.  These  statues 
were  often  of  colossal  dimensions. 

Sculpture  existed  in  other  forms  and  in 
great  abundance,  and  also  from  the  earliest 
times  there  are  wooden  statues,  and  statues 
of  the  hardest  materials,  basalt  and  diorite, 
dating  from  a  time  long  antecedent  to  any 
dates  which  generally  have  been  assumed 
as  the  earliest  of  human  civilization.  But 
at  the  same  time  that  sculpture  was  carried 
on  independently  and  for  the  sake  of  the 
beautiful  works  of  art  resulting  from  the 
unfettered  play  of  the  human  mind  and  hand, 
there  were  produced  works  of  sculpture 
which  are  closely  attached  to  and  form  a  not- 
able part  of  the  buildings  themselves.  Then, 
when  the  work  of  Greece  began  to  rise  out 
of  the  semi- Asiatic  Mycenaean  period,  sculp- 
ture of  human  subject  replaced  very  rapidly, 
for  the  exterior  decoration  of  the  temple,  the 
glass  mosaic,  the  metal  capitals,  and  the  like, 
by  which  the  early  monuments  were  made 
[160] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

splendid  if  not  always  beautiful  to  behold. 
The  temple  walls  themselves  in  the  time  of 
perfected  Greek  art  did  not  receive  sculp- 
ture in  any  case;  but  this  is  chiefly  because 
the  buildings  which  have  come  down  to  us 
as  being  the  most  important  monuments  of 
Greek  art  have  but  little  exterior  walling, 
which  is  not  masked  by  colonnades  throw- 
ing deep  shadows  and  preventing  a  full  view 
of  the  smoother  wall  behind.  The  one  ex- 
periment made  in  the  Parthenon  seems  not 
to  have  been  repeated.  There  is  no  other 
frieze  set  on  the  back  wall  of  the  colon- 
nade. There  are  elsewhere  continuous 
friezes  or  figures  in  low  relief,  such  as  the 
one  which  follows  the  exterior  of  the  wall 
of  the  sacred  enclosure  at  Gjolbaschi;  but 
this  is  really  a  bounding  wall,  and  no  part 
of  a  building  in  the  usual  sense;  it  is  the 
enclosure  of  a  temenos,  or  sacred  place. 
There  is  the  frieze  of  the  temple  at  Bassae, 
but  that  also  is  free  from  the  interference  of 
columns.  There  is  the  monument  of  Lysi- 
krates,  and  again  the  main  frieze  in  the 
Erechtheion;  but  indeed,  if  we  had  more 
[161] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

completed  and  not  ruined  buildings  of 
Ionic  style  to  refer  to,  we  should  have  more 
of  these ;  but  those  friezes  of  the  entablature 
are  necessarily  small  and  low,  the  figures 
themselves  of  almost  minute  proportions. 
There  is  the  parapet  which  surrounds  the 
temple  of  Athena  Nike ;  and  in  this,  almost 
for  the  first  time  since  the  Parthenon,  we 
find  figures  in  relief  of  important  scale  and 
free  and  vigorous  treatment.  There  is  the 
mausoleum  at  Halicarnassos ;  and  at  Perga- 
mon  there  is  the  smaller  frieze  above,  and 
the  huge  and  abnormally  great  and  vigor- 
ous frieze  of  the  Battle  of  the  Gods  and 
Giants;  but  it  is  curious  that  among  all 
these  examples  almost  none  of  them  play  an 
important  part  in  the  adornment  of  the 
building.  The  maxim  stated  in  the  first 
sentence  of  this  lecture  has  been  verified  in 
almost  every  one  of  these  examples.  The 
ornamenting  has  been  done  because  here 
was  a  large  and  prominent  piece  of  smooth 
stone  work  which  formed  so  tempting  — 
so  obvious  and  natural  —  so  easily  a  medium 
for  the  display  of  the  sculptor's  art.  Reliefs 

[162] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

are  also  used  in  those  square  panels  which 
are  left  between  the  triglyphs  of  the 
Doric  entablature.  Not  all  these  metopes 
are  carved ;  some  are  painted,  some  are  plain 
and  bare,  and  have  always  been  so,  as  we 
think;  but  where  these  are  carved  they  are 
apt  to  be  in  high  relief.  In  the  Parthenon 
these  alto-reliefs  have  parts  wholly  detached 
from  the  background;  they  are  half-way 
between  bas-relief  and  the  free  figure  sculp- 
ture mentioned  below. 

Sculpture  in  the  form  of  free  statuary 
occurs,  in  connection  with  buildings,  mainly 
in  the  form  of  groups  which  fill  the  tri- 
angular panel  at  either  end  of  the  roof  of 
the  temple.  This  triangular  panel,  which 
with  the  moulded  projecting  plates  below 
and  above  forms  what  we  call  the  pediment, 
was  again  simply  the  most  obvious  and  nat- 
ural place  to  set  up  statues.  It  was  at  a 
rather  too  great  height  above  the  ground 
outside,  but  this  was  made  up  for  by  the 
vivid  and  strenuous  painting  in  clear  and 
bright  colors  of  the  statuary  and  the  back- 
ground which  set  it  ofF.  It  is  curious  to 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

note  how,  in  that  mental  reconstruction 
which  we  are  compelled  to  make  of  each 
important  temple,  the  sculpture  in  this  form 
of  statuary  in  the  round  assumes  the  shape 
of  an  accessory  which  might  perfectly  well 
be  omitted,  and  which  could  be  replaced 
by  painting  the  triangular  panel,  or  by  filling 
it  with  mosaic  or  inlay,  —  which,  in  short, 
formed  no  obvious  and  natural  part  of  the 
temple  structure. 

We  have  really  only  a  single  monument 
of  pure  Greek  style  in  which  the  sculpture 
is  an  absolutely  essential  part.  Others  ex- 
isted; we  know  that  they  existed  in  Delos, 
in  Epidauros.  We  have  no  record  of  what 
they  were,  and  their  names  are  merely  a 
part  of  that  record  of  irreparable  loss  to 
which  we  soon  grow  accustomed.  After 
having  passed  in  review  the  splendid  history 
of  Greek  civilization,  the  one  monument 
of  associated  and  truly  architectural  sculp- 
ture which  remains  for  us  is  the  Portico  of 
the  Maidens,  that  is  to  say,  of  the  draped 
statues  carrying  on  their  heads  the  entabla- 
ture which  once  supported  the  roof  at  the 
[164] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

south  side  of  the  Erechtheion.  Now,  as 
regards  this  building,  one  has  to  give  its 
image  in  photography,  or  give  a  description 
of  it,  or  both ;  for  it  stands  alone  as  a  speci- 
men of  a  class  which  has  disappeared,  and 
this  is  the  peculiarity  of  the  situation,  that 
there  is  a  general  unwillingness  to  admit 
that  this  could  have  been  a  normal  and 
natural  piece  of  Greek  decorative  work. 
We  are  so  accustomed  to  think  of  Greek 
buildings  as  devoid  of  decorative  treatment 
other  than  by  use  of  delicate  mouldings, 
and  to  think  of  Greek  sculpture  in  any 
other  way  than  as  reliefs  or  as  free  statues, 
that  it  seems  foreign  to  our  notions  of  pro- 
priety that  the  people  of  Hellas  should  have 
allowed  themselves  architectural  sculpture 
in  its  true  form ;  that  is  to  say,  as  constitut- 
ing an  important  part  of  the  design  of  the 
structure.  We  know  the  Doric  temples  as 
buildings  without  architectural  sculpture; 
the  Ionic  temples  are  all  ruined  and  de- 
stroyed except  the  Erechtheion;  we  are 
only  half  prepared  to  believe  that  which  may 
still  be  accepted  as  truth,  that  those  Ionic 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

buildings  were  treated  much  as  the  Cathe- 
drals of  medieval  France  were  treated  — 
with  sculpture  forming  an  inseparable  part 
of  their  design. 

Now,  as  these  great  buildings  and  parts  of 
buildings  are  all  ruined,  it  is  well  to  correct 
our  observation  of  such  mangled  and  dis- 
figured works  of  art  by  those  works  of  the 
great  period  of  Greek  art  which  we  have 
almost  wholly  intact;  viz.,  the  memorial 
stelai  which  were  set  up  beside  graves  in  the 
churchyards  near  city  walls.  The  very  first 
picture  which  we  studied  at  the  com- 
mencement of  this  course  of  lectures  was  one 
of  those  tomb  sculptures;  and  I  show  you 
now  (Fig.  i)  a  stele  of  two  ladies,  sisters 
perhaps,  whose  names  are  carved  upon  the 
narrow  epistyle  above.  In  a  small  way  the 
conditions  of  architectural  treatment  are  seen 
in  these  upright  slabs.  The  high  relief  is 
sheltered  in  a  way  by  a  projecting  roof,  which 
is  carried  by  just  such  antas  as  are  used  at  a 
temple  porch,  only  smaller ;  and  the  feeling 
of  the  Greek  for  the  surrounding  by  archi- 
tectural forms  of  his  more  elaborate,  more 
[166] 


H 
X 
M 

O 

en  ?° 
O  > 

c  r 

H" 
«,S 

5"    ^  H 

3   %3 

D- 

»      1 

a         JC 

I    S 


S-   5= 


REIMS  CATHEDRAL,   MIDDLE  PORCH 
TWO  STATUES  OF  SOUTH  JAMB 

LECTURE  V.    FIGURE  7 


MARBLE  RELIEF  AND  SHIELDS  OF  ARMS 

Formerly  built  into  wall  of  house  at  Ponte  dei  Dai,  Venice.    Removed 

about  1883 

LECTURE  V.    FIGURE  8 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

refined  and  complete  sculpture  is  seen  even 
in  this  minor  example.  It  is  just  in  that 
way  that  the  statues  of  the  pediment  were 
set  up,  standing  in  the  place  made  by  the 
geison  or  shelf  made  by  the  top  of  the  hori- 
zontal cornice,  and  sheltered  in  part  by  the 
overhanging  of  the  cornice  at  the  edge  of 
the  roof  it  is  on.  In  this  example  (Fig.  2) 
the  slab  of  Dexileos,  where  the  idea  remains 
of  the  projecting  shelter,  it  is  different,  as  the 
pediment  has  never  had  support  in  the  way  of 
pillars  of  any  sort.  However  it  may  have 
been  surrounded  by  other  parts  of  a  greater 
structure,  the  overhanging  piece  itself  has 
had  no  support.  The  artist  has  cut  away  the 
whole  of  the  surface  of  his  slab  from  side  to 
side,  sinking  the  background  many  inches 
back  from  the  highest  point  of  the  relief,  and 
leaving  the  vigorous  action  as  if  in  the  case 
of  an  equestrian  statue.  Much  smaller  and  less 
grandiose  sculptures  are  found  in  abundance 
in  Athens,  and  in  such  other  cities  of  Greece 
as  have  been  rather  thoroughly  searched  with 
the  use  of  spade  and  pickaxe.  The  museum 
of  the  Acropolis  alone  contains  scores  of 
[167] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

votive  and  memorial  tablets.  There  is  one  in 
which  is  recorded  the  greeting  of  the  Goddess 
Athena,  the  protectress  of  the  city  named 
from  her,  and  the  people  of  that  city  embod- 
ied in  the  draped  figure  which  we  call  Demos. 
Demos,  here,  is  an  elderly  male  figure. 

The  composition  (Fig.  3 )  heads  the  record 
given  below  of  an  important  event  in  the 
city  of  Athens,  an  event  which  happened  in 
398  B.  C.  In  this  relief  of  three  figures, 
the  subject  of  the  legend  is  a  treaty  made 
between  Athens  and  the  State  of  Korkyra,  or 
Corcyra,  in  375  B.  C.;  and  here  the  Goddess 
Athena  standing  for  Athens,  and  a  female 
figure  meant  to  personify  the  state  of  Cor- 
cyra, appear  before  a  seated  male  figure,  who 
embodies  in  himself  one  of  those  great  inter- 
national tribunals  which  the  pan-Hellenic 
spirit  created  to  preserve  peace  and  a  certain 
amount  of  common  feeling  among  the  states 
of  the  too  scattered,  too  often  quarrelling 
peoples  of  Greece. 

In  a  former  lecture  we  looked  at  one  of 
those  great  slabs  from  the  destroyed  arch 
of  Marcus  Aurelius.  The  one  which  we 
[168] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

then  chose  represents  the  entry  into  a 
conquered  town  on  the  borders  of  southern 
Germany,  of  the  philosophical  emperor  with 
his  soldiers  and  his  advisers  of  state.  In 
another  of  the  same  group  we  see  Marcus 
Aurelius  preparing  to  offer  a  solemn  sacrifice; 
and  the  architectural  background  of  this  one 
seems  to  fix  the  place  as  the  Roman  Forum 
itself.  The  victim,  the  sacrificing  priest 
with  axe  in  hand,  the  acolytes  beyond,  who 
bring  water  or  wine  or  other  things  needed 
for  the  ceremony,  the  flamen  with  his 
curious  official  cap  seen  just  beyond  the 
emperor,  and  the  singular  grouping  of  the 
whole  assembly,  bring  the  student  into  that 
pleasant,  inquiring  mood  which  is  so  often 
our  state  of  mind  in  the  presence  of  the 
important  works  of  antiquity.  To  lead  our- 
selves into  their  habit  of  mind;  to  know 
what  those  men  were  thinking  of,  not  so 
much  the  emperor  (for  it  is  hard  indeed 
for  us  to  see  how  a  philosophical  man  upon 
whom  was  forced  the  almost  unlimited 
sovereignty  of  the  Mediterranean  world 
would  have  looked  at  his  own  fate  and  at 
[169] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

life),  not  so  much  the  Emperor  himself, 
but  to  see  things  as  any  one  of  his  attending 
ministers  would  have  looked  at  them  —  is, 
indeed,  a  definite  object  of  study. 

Now,  let  us  consider  another  Roman 
work — the  great  Mausoleum  of  Hadrian, 
on  the  Tiber,  the  same  building  which  is 
now  called  the  Castello  Sant'  Angelo.  Con- 
jectural restorations  are  not,  of  course,  ab- 
solute ;  nobody  would  pin  his  faith  to  them 
without  reserve;  but  it  is  evident  enough 
that  the  general  scheme  of  the  building  was 
as  it  is  generally  represented.  The  great 
circular  drum  is  surrounded  by  columns, 
and  a  small  round  peristyle  is  at  a  higher 
level.  The  independent  position  of  the 
statuary  is  even  more  absolutely  asserted  here 
than  in  the  case  of  the  Greek  building  we 
have  named.  The  statues  are  set  up  be- 
tween the  columns  of  each  order,  and  also 
on  a  sort  of  cornice  above,  although  one  may 
dispute  altogether  this  third  row  of  statues, 
if  he  pleases.  A  similar  arrangement  ex- 
isted unquestionably  in  the  famous  tomb  at 
Halicarnassos,  which  gives  us  the  term 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

mausoleum.  There  were  friezes  in  relief  on 
the  walls  of  that  great  tomb,  but  the  statuary 
stood  free  between  the  shafts  of  the  col- 
umns. Or  take  the  arch  of  Titus  at  Rome. 
Here  is  the  Roman  system  of  combining 
sculpture  closely  with  the  architectural  or- 
donnance,  and  therewith  the  Roman  custom 
of  bringing  statues  against  the  sky.  The 
bronze  figures  set  upon  the  top  of  the  struc- 
ture, that  quadriga  with  its  triumphing  im- 
perator  which  must  have  been  there,  and 
the  grooms  leading  the  horses,  and  perhaps 
two  Victories,  one  on  either  side,  all  these 
have  disappeared,  and  their  character  and 
places  can  only  be  conjectured;  but  other- 
wise the  sculpture  of  the  building  is  recog- 
nizable. The  sacrificial  procession  in  the 
frieze ;  the  admirable  figure  carved  upon  the 
front  of  the  keystone  and  giving  an  almost 
Gothic  freedom  to  the  combination  of 
sculpture  with  architectural  forms;  the  fa- 
mous high-reliefs  under  the  arch,  one  on 
either  side,  and  representing,  as  you  know, 
the  triumphal  procession  bearing  along  the 
trophies  of  the  siege  of  Jerusalem  —  these 

['70 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

reliefs  are  just  above  your  head  as  you  pass 
through  the  arch  on  horseback  or  in  a  char- 
iot. It  is,  of  course,  not  known  to  us  how 
busy  a  way  was  that  one.  If  the  hustling 
crowd  of  the  Imperial  City  streamed  through 
there  on  that  road,  we  should  challenge  the 
fitness  of  the  location  for  so  important  a 
triumphal  sculpture;  but  this  is  the  only 
questioning  criticism  that  we  make,  for,  in- 
deed, this  arch  is  one  of  the  best  in  its 
scheme  and  plan  of  any  that  has  come 
down  to  us.  And  let  it  be  said,  it  was 
really  a  "triumphal"  arch;  for  of  the  four 
or  five  hundred  Roman  arches  which  are 
known  to  have  existed,  the  majority  were 
not  triumphal;  that  is  to  say,  they  had  noth- 
ing to  do  with  a  triumph.  They  were 
memorials,  which  were  often  erected  after 
the  death  of  the  great  citizen  in  whose 
honor  they  were  put  up,  or  by  vote  of  the 
Senate,  or  by  the  authority  of  some  provin- 
cial governor. 

You  will  not  need  to  be  reminded  of  the 
larger  and  more  splendid  arch  of  which  you 
have  the  beautiful  photograph  hanging  in 
[172] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

the  Sculpture  Gallery  alongside  of  the  un- 
usual and  really  splendid  casts  of  sculptures 
from  its  face.  That  arch  of  Trajan  at  Bene- 
vento  is  the  best  preserved  of  all  the  great 
arches,  and  it  is  of  quite  inestimable  value 
and  importance  to  us  because  it  is  so  noble 
an  example  of  Roman  Imperial  art  at  its 
culminating  period. 

Now,  to  skip  eight  centuries  and  to  take 
the  Romanesque  art  of  middle  France  also 
at  its  culminating  period,  let  us  consider 
the  front  of  Angouleme  Cathedral.  It  is  a 
noble  church,  and  its  sculpture  is  among 
the  most  beautiful  of  the  time ;  but  I  think 
that  we  must  discriminate,  and  not  claim 
for  its  ordonnance  a  wholly  faultless  lay- 
out, so  far  as  the  sculpture  is  concerned.  It 
seems  to  be  huddled  into  place,  it  does  not 
seem  to  have  grown  naturally  out  of  the 
architecture.  But  if  we  look  at  a  single 
detail  of  it,  we  shall  see  how  perfect  is  the 
application  of  the  sculpture  in  each  given 
member  of  the  front.  We  shall  find  in 
the  work  of  the  great  Gothic  period  an 
immeasurably  more  noble  sculpture,  and  a 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

vastly  more  perfect  alliance  of  the  sculpture 
with  the  building,  but  we  shall  hardly  find 
there  or  elsewhere  in  the  history  of  art  a 
more  admirable  piece  of  sculptured  orna- 
mentation. 

Or  if  we  take  the  Church  of  Notre 
Dame  la  Grande  at  Poitiers,  here  is  cer- 
tainly a  more  perfect  distribution  of  the 
sculpture.  In  that  case  it  was  proposed  to 
carve  every  part  of  the  front,  at  least  all  the 
flat  part  of  the  front,  and  to  repeat  that 
elaborate  embossing  of  the  whole  surface 
by  the  admirable  disposition  of  the  imbrica- 
tions which  cover  the  little  cones  at  the  head 
of  the  flanking  towers.  Imagine  yourself 
called  upon  to  emboss  such  a  front,  using 
fourteen  statues  or  groups  in  as  many  niches, 
a  descriptive  bas-relief  covering  every  part 
of  the  flat  wall  above  the  arches  of  the 
lowest  story,  and  a  covering  pattern  of  great 
richness  investing  all  the  faces  of  all  the 
arches  —  say  the  archivolts  and  soffits  of  not 
less  than  twenty-two  arches  of  actual  con- 
struction. It  would  be  no  shame  to  any 
modern  designer  to  confess  that  that  effort 


PONTE   DI   PARAD1SO,  AT  VENICE 
LECTURE  V.    FIGURE  g 


LUNETTE,   FLORENCE,   BY  LUCA   UELLA   ROBB1A 
Formerly  in  a  house-wall,  now  in  National  Museum 

LECTURE  V.    FIGURE  10 


LOGGIA   Dl  SAN  PAOLO,  FLORENCE.    THE   MEETING  OF 

SAINTS  DOMINIC  AND  FRANCIS,  BY  LUCA 

DELLA  ROBB1A 

LECTURE  V.    FIGURE  n 


FRONT  OF  THE  OPERA   HOUSE,   PARIS 
Finished,  1875;  the  design  of  Charles  Gamier,  died,  1898 

LECTURE  V.    FIGURE  12 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

was  beyond  his  strength,  at  least  beyond 
his  training. 

The  sculpture  of  the  far  south  of  France 
is  claimed  by  the  French  authorities  them- 
selves to  be  more  soft  and,  in  a  way,  classical 
— far  less  notably  invested  with  the  savage 
energy  of  the  northern  style  out  of  which 
the  Gothic  architecture  was  to  spring;  and 
I  think  the  result  of  considerable  familiarity 
with  the  sculpture  of  both  the  north  and 
the  south  will  tend  to  give  to  us  a  greater 
care  for  the  former, — will  tend  to  convince 
the  student  that  the  glory  of  Romanesque 
art  is  to  be  found  north  of  the  mountain 
chain  of  the  Cevennes  and  between  them 
and  the  Province  of  Flanders.  Indeed,  a 
still  narrower  field  might  be  marked  out, 
but  we  will  not  be  too  precise  when  there 
is  no  opportunity  to  explain  the  reasons  for 
our  precision. 

Meantime,  consider  the  most  famous  and 
most  valuable  specimens  of  that  southern 
sculpture.  The  great  portal  of  the  church 
of  Saint  Gilles  has  been  rather  closely  fol- 
lowed in  its  disposition  by  the  architects  of 

['75]  ' 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

the  Church  of  Saint  Bartholomew  in  New 
York.  This  church  of  Saint  Gilles  was 
never  completed;  and  indeed,  this  magnifi- 
cent frontispiece  and  a  single  half-completed 
spiral  staircase  on  the  flank  of  the  choir  is 
all  that  we  expect  to  see.  There  is  an 
eleventh-century  dwelling-house  across  the 
street  from  the  flank  of  the  church,  but  it 
has  been  restored  out  of  recognition  and 
its  value  greatly  impaired. 

A  better  known  front  is  that  of  Saint 
Trophime  at  Aries,  a  church  now  used  as 
the  cathedral  of  the  town,  but  originally  a 
monastic  church  with  a  singularly  rich 
cloister.  The  cloister  has  a  very  famous 
system  of  colonnettes  arranged  in  pairs,  two 
in  the  thickness  of  the  wall ;  these  alternate 
with  large  square  piers  which  divide  the  ar- 
cade at  each  fourth  interval,  and  the  piers 
themselves  are  flanked  by  statuary  of  great 
relative  importance.  One  agrees  with  the 
Frenchmen  who  have  ruled  that  there  is 
too  much  of  a  Sicilian  softness  about  this 
work,  and  that  the  admixture  of  barbaric 
energy  with  Roman  tradition  is  more 

[176] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

perfectly  established  in  the  north  than  here ; 
but  how  dignified  and  full  of  opportunity 
is  this  sculptured  cloister,  how  successful  as 
a  piece  of  decorative  art  are  its  long-drawn 
walks ! 

Now,  when  we  touch  upon  the  Gothic 
system,  it  is  quite  ^necessary  to  deal  with  the 
whole  building — so  close  is  the  alliance,  in 
this  style,  between  sculpture  and  architec- 
ture. This  is  the  west  front  of  the  Cathe- 
dral at  Chartres  (Fig.  4),  and  the  three 
doorways,  of  which  you  see  one  only,  are 
of  Romanesque  type,  or,  if  you  please,  of 
the  Transition,  and  the  story  about  those 
doorways  is  pretty  nearly  this :  That  origi- 
nally the  nave  was  shorter  by  two  bays, 
and  that  that  great  south  tower,  the  most 
famous  steeple  in  France  or  in  Europe,  was 
built,  and  with  it  the  lower  part  of  the  north 
tower,  at  the  close  of  the  twelfth  century. 
Thus  the  church,  or  at  least  the  nave  itself, 
was  lengthened  by  rebuilding  its  front  in 
the  place  where  you  see  it  now.  It  must 
be  that  the  three  doorways  were  those  of 
the  older  and  Romanesque  cathedral,  but 

[-77] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

these  remarks  are  not  offered  by  way 
of  apology.  Nowhere  in  the  world  has 
statuary  been  made  so  architectural  in 
effect.  If  you  will  ask,  as  students  do  ask 
from  time  to  time,  why  the  proportions  of 
the  human  form  are  abandoned  altogether 
in  this  design,  and  no  attempt  made  to  pre- 
serve even  the  relation  of  the  head  to  the 
body,  or  of  the  width  and  thickness  of  the 
draped  person  to  total  vertical  height,  the 
answer  is  that  these  statues  are  serving  al- 
most absolutely  as  caryatides;  for  though 
their  heads  do  not  support  the  cushion  or 
basket  upon  which  the  superstructure  is 
rested,  they  themselves  (the  figures)  are 
carved  upon  the  very  stone  of  which  the 
column  is  made  up.  It  is  a  new  order  of 
columnar  architecture — an  order  in  which 
the  shaft  was  to  be  completed  by  this 
sculptured  human  form  upon  its  outer  face. 
The  sculpture  of  the  tympanums  and  the 
lintels  below  them  is  still  wholly  Roman- 
esque in  distribution,  but  on  the  arches 
which  rise  above  those  flat  roofs,  the  Gothic 
system  of  little  niches  with  a  statue  in  each 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

is  already  well  established.  The  south  porch 
of  the  same  church  which  I  show  you  now 
(Fig.  5)  is  the  porch  leading  to  the  south 
transept  and  which  was  just  visible  in  the 
picture  of  the  west  front.  It  is  entirely 
Gothic.  That  is,  it  belongs  to  the  period 
of  complete  ribbed  vaulting  and  of  the  de- 
veloped Gothic  sculpture,  and  it  is  interesting 
to  see  here  also  how  the  statues  are  inherent 
parts  of  the  vertical  structure,  of  the  great 
pier  which  served  at  once  as  impost  and  as 
buttress  for  the  arches  of  the  porch. 

Now,  one  word  about  the  Cathedral  of 
Reims,  for  it  is  in  this  west  portal  (Fig.  6) 
that  the  Gothic  statuary  reached  its  highest 
level.  Here  we  see  the  statues  on  one  flank 
of  the  central  doorway  and  of  a  side  doorway, 
and  here  are  two  statues  by  themselves.  The 
two  statues  put  together,  as  seen  in  Fig.  7, 
form  the  exquisite  group  which  we  know  as 
the  Visitation ;  that  is,  the  meeting  of  Mary, 
the  mother  of  Jesus,  and  Elizabeth,  the 
mother  of  John.  The  photograph  of  the 
general  view  in  this  case  is  vague  and  not  as 
distinct  as  we  need  it  for  the  study  of  details; 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

but  the  general  charm  of  the  porches  may  be 
more  intelligibly  seen  through  this  hazy  me- 
dium than  if  every  detail  were  sharply  noted. 
You  will  notice  two  tendencies  here  which 
indeed  seem  to  be  inevitable  in  sculpture.  As 
the  artist  grows  more  competent  to  deal  with 
the  human  figure,  both  nude  and  draped  —  as 
he  learns  the  secrets  of  anatomy,  observes  the 
action  and  pose  of  the  body,  and  notes  more 
and  more  closely  what  is  beautiful  in  the  cast- 
ing of  the  loose  garment  about  the  form — 
he  grows  less  interested  in  architectural  sculp- 
ture of  the  older  and  simpler  sort.  So  in  this 
noble  porch  there  is  shown,  below  the  feet 
of  the  great  statues,  nothing  but  a  really  fee- 
ble and  inadequate  motive  —  a  poor  little 
affectation  of  a  curtain  or  loose  hanging  gath- 
ered in  festoons,  in  the  very  spot,  mind  you, 
where  the  Cathedral  of  Amiens  has  that 
magnificent  series  of  bas-reliefs  in  which 
Ruskin  thought  he  found  the  whole  Bible 
history  portrayed.  In  like  manner  you  will 
look  in  vain  among  these  statues  and  the 
statues  in  the  arch  above  for  leaf  or  flower 
sculpture  as  effective  as  that  in  earlier  and  less 

[180] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

splendid  churches.  The  knowledge  of  na- 
ture is  there,  as  you  will  see  in  the  capitals 
above  the  heads  of  Mary  and  Elizabeth,  but 
the  care  for  it,  the  profound  love  and  sym- 
pathy for  it,  is  diminished.  It  was  so  with 
the  Greeks  —  apparently  it  will  always  be  so. 
Success  in  figure  work  has  always  tended  to 
make  the  artist  careless  of  the  detail  of  lesser 
aspects  of  nature.  The  great  Venetian 
painter,  Paul  Veronese,  and  his  fellows,  are 
almost  the  only  artists  of  the  highest  rank 
who  have  retained  their  love  of  detail. 

Now  see  fourteenth-century  work — dec- 
oration of  garden  gates  and  simple  house- 
walls  in  Venice.  See  in  Fig.  8  how  the 
mediasval  love  of  sculpture  has  led  to  a  more 
advanced  art,  at  once  narrative  and  artistically 
perfect.  This  bas-relief,  with  its  accom- 
panying shields  of  arms,  was,  until  recently, 
built  into  a  house-wall  at  the  entrance  to 
the  Merceria,  just  north  of  the  great  square 
of  St.  Mark  at  Venice.  This  was  fifteenth- 
century  work:  but  that  of  an  earlier  time 
has  constant  interest  for  the  student.  Do 
not  forget  that  the  fourteenth  century 
[181] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

in  Italy  is  a  much  more  advanced  epoch, 
a  more  modern  epoch,  than  the  same 
years  in  the  north;  the  spirit  of  the  Re- 
naissance was  already  starting  in  Italy, 
and  so  we  find  two  Renaissance  interpre- 
tations of  the  Story  of  Saint  Martin  and  the 
Beggar,  and  in  each  in  a  subordinate  place  is 
seen  the  arms  of  the  family  which  held  the 
property,  the  house  and  garden  beyond  the 
gate.  Passing  to  a  more  elaborate  and  very 
well-known  instance,  look  at  this  tablet 
which  is  set  up  upon  two  imposts  across  a  nar- 
row calle,  which  is  reached  by  going  over  the 
little  Bridge  of  Paradise,  so  called  (Fig.  9). 
The  traditional  account  of  this  feature,  not 
known  in  other  cities,  is  that  the  two  man- 
sions which  flank  the  little  calle  were  held 
by  the  same  family.  The  subject,  however, 
is  purely  religious.  The  Madonna,  with 
wide-spread  mantle,  is  covering  her  wor- 
shipper, a  person  who  may  be  assumed  to  be 
the  donor  of  the  piece. 

All  this  smacks  of  the  revival  of  classical 
art.  It  is  not  Roman  art,  but  it  comes  of  the 
study  of  Roman  antiquity.  Three-quarters 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

of  a  century  elapses  and  then  we  find  the 
completed  and  developed  Renaissance  in 
the  work  of  one  of  its  greatest  and  most 
lovable  men,  Luca  della  Robbia.  This 
lunette  (Fig.  10)  is  one  of  the  many  de- 
tached reliefs  of  Robbia  work  which  we 
find  set  up  along  the  streets  of  Florence, 
often  in  places  where  their  presence  is  not 
easy  to  explain.  This  one,  for  instance,  is 
built  into  a  wall  in  the  Via  dell'  Agnolo; 
but  that  means,  of  course,  that  there  had 
been  a  church  or  the  entrance  to  a  convent 
thereabout,  which  buildings  have  been  re- 
moved, while  the  sculpture  was  preserved. 
As  usual  in  such  reliefs,  the  figures  them- 
selves are  white  on  a  ground  of  blue, 
the  whole  being  covered  as  you  know 
with  a  delicate  glaze,  which  receives  strong 
color  in  the  most  perfect  way.  The  flower 
decoration  in  the  archivolt  is,  on  the  other 
hand,  in  strong  colors,  as  was  that  fountain 
in  the  sacristy  which  I  showed  you  a  week 
ago.  But  now  we  will  consider  the  great- 
est existing  work  of  the  family  della  Robbia, 
in  the  little  town  of  Pistoja,  a  few  miles 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

north  of  Florence,  on  the  road  to  Modena. 
It  contains  a  little  hospital,  a  building  of  two 
stories  above  an  open  arcade,  and  a  broad 
frieze  runs  along  the  front  and  returns  along 
both  ends  of  the  small  building.  There  are 
seven  divisions  in  this  frieze.  One  subject 
fills  each  of  the  end  walls,  and  five  go  to 
make  up  the  longer  central  piece,  that  of 
the  main  fa9ade.  They  are  all  devoted  to 
the  works  of  mercy — the  seven  virtuous  acts; 
and  the  first  shows  "Feeding  the  Hungry" 
All  of  these  figures  are  in  enamelled  terra- 
cotta, as  are  the  other  works  which  we  call 
Robbia  work,  and  these  colors  are  used 
freely;  and  as  you  see,  great  vivacity,  inten- 
sity of  expression,  strength,  and  realism  of  all 
kinds  have  been  employed  in  it. 

In  one  of  the  pictures  is  shown  "  Clothing 
the  Naked"  and  we  have  the  wretched  beg- 
gars to  whom  garments  are  being  doled  out 
and  children  brought  by  women,  who  ask 
for  them  a  share  in  the  charitable  dole. 
Again,  we  have  the  Giving  of  Aid  to  Travellers, 
and  in  this  composition  the  artist  has  flown  a 
little  higher  and  has  associated  his  design  with 
[184] 


FRONTISPIECE  ADDED  IN  1003  TO  CHURCH  OF  ST. 
BARTHOLOMEW,  NEW  YORK 

LECTURE  V.    FIGURE  13 


DETAIL  OF  THE   FRONT,   FIGURE  13 
LECTURE  V.    FIGURE  14 


fa  O 
° 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

religion  in  this  way:  First,  he  has  pilgrims 
as  his  travellers.  They  all  appear  as  newly 
come  from  the  Holy  Land,  with  scrip  and 
staff  and  cockle-shell ;  and  again,  in  one  of 
these  pilgrims  is  to  be  recognized  the  Saviour 
of  the  world.  It  does  not  appear  that  they 
recognize  the  Divine  Being,  but  the  artist 
means  that  the  spectator  shall  recognize  him. 
There  is  nowhere  a  more  perfect  instance  or 
a  more  perfect  combination  in  one  design, 
of  a  noble  decorative  effect  with  a  realistic 
simplicity  and  a  moral  significance. 

I  show  you  another  piece  (Fig.  1 1),  the 
one  which  of  all  the  numerous  works  of  the 
family  seems  to  be  the  noblest,  the  lunette 
which  opens  upon  the  gallery  or  arcade  of 
St.  Paul  in  the  square  opposite  the  church 
of  St.  Maria  Novella.  The  subject  is  the 
meeting  and  greeting  of  the  two  great  found- 
ers of  religious  monastic  bodies — St.  Dom- 
inic, in  his  white  robe,  and  St.  Francis,  in 
his  brown  or  cinder-colored  gown — meet- 
ing, we  may  suppose,  in  Heaven;  the  leader 
of  the  great  order  of  poverty,  the  friars  prop- 
erly so-called,  and  the  leader  of  the  preaching 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

monks,  the  man  who  tried  to  complete  St. 
Francis's  work  by  insisting  upon  dogma. 

When  St.  Paul's  Cathedral  was  built  in 
London,  between  1675  and  1 700,  architectu- 
ral sculpture,  or  sculpture  of  the  old  sort 
used  architecturally,  had  almost  ceased  to 
exist.  The  perfunctory  acanthus  leaves  of 
the  capitals,  and  a  few  descriptive  reliefs  in 
the  pediment,  which  do  not  fill  the  pedi- 
ment,— which  form  really  an  ornamental 
adjunct  hanging  in  the  middle  of  it,  —  these 
and  the  very  few  statues  showing  against 
the  sky  are  all  the  great  cathedral  offers. 
There  is,  indeed,  admirable  wood-carving 
within,  and  if  it  were  a  history  of  orna- 
mental sculpture  we  were  writing,  it  would 
have  to  be  considered  carefully.  I  want 
to  make  it  clear  that  there  was  that  lapse 
of  time  from  the  middle  of  the  seven- 
teenth century  on  to  the  French  Revolu- 
tion when  sculpture,  applied  to  a  building  as 
part  of  its  system  of  design,  had  been  almost 
forgotten;  and  I  wish  to  insist  upon  this, 
because  it  makes  more  interesting  the  return 
to  the  display  of  fine  sculpture  in  much  more 
t'86] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

recent  monuments.  After  the  French  Revo- 
lution people  tried  to  study  real  antiquities ; 
they  tried  to  go  back  of  the  Renaissance  and 
of  the  classic  learning  and  decoration  and 
to  draw  from  Roman  art  direct.  So  it  was 
that  they  studied  the  great  memorial  arches 
of  Imperial  Rome,  and  so  it  was  that,  when 
Napoleon  undertook  the  construction  of  a 
vast  monument  to  record  the  glories  of  his 
campaigns  and  to  do  honor  to  his  fellow- 
soldiers,  his  advisers  naturally  chose  the  form 
of  a  Roman  arch,  which,  however,  they  in- 
creased in  scale  until  they  made  it  larger 
than  the  largest  building  of  the  kind  which 
had  existed  previously.  On  the  side  toward 
Paris  are  two  great  groups  of  sculpture ;  that 
to  the  south  is  that  high  relief  showing  "  The 
Departure  for  the  War,"  the  most  renowned 
work  of  the  sculptor  Fran£ois  Rude.  The 
other  piece,  that  to  the  north,  is  "  The  Deifi- 
cation of  Napoleon."  On  the  side  toward 
Neuilly,  the  two  corresponding  groups  by 
Antoine  fitex  represent  the  one  on  the  north, 
resistance  of  the  French  to  the  invading 
armies  of  1814;  that  on  the  south  the 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

blessings  of  peace.  That  arch  was  finished 
by  the  successors  of  the  great  emperor;  it 
was  not  wholly  abandoned  even  by  his  ene- 
mies of  the  Restoration,  and  it  was  finished 
under  Louis  Philippe  about  1 845.  It  seems 
odd  to  us  now  that  only  fifteen  years  were  to 
elapse  before  the  building  was  begun  of  the 
great  Opera  House  at  Paris.  This  (Fig.  1 2) 
was  intended  to  express  the  glory  and  the  civic 
splendor  of  the  second  empire,  which  indeed 
did  so  much  to  make  Paris  the  admirable 
city  we  know.  Our  purpose  is  mainly  with 
the  sculpture,  and  you  will  note  that  here 
there  have  been  consulted  other  influences, 
other  arguments,  other  rules  of  procedure; 
for  it  had  been  made  clear  to  sculptors  that 
they  must  insist  on  putting  their  great  works 
nearer  to  the  eye.  Therefore,  while  certain 
pieces  are  set  high  on  the  roofs  with  the  sky 
for  their  background,  they  being  in  this  way 
sacrificed,  for  nothing  shows  aright  with  the 
brilliant  sky  (even  though  on  a  cloudy  day) 
eating  away  its  outline,  yet  the  important 
pieces  are  on  pedestals  hardly  higher  than 
the  heads  of  the  passers-by.  One  of  these 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

two  groups  on  the  right  is  that  composition 
by  Carpeaux,  "The  Dance,"  which  caused  so 
much  of  an  excitement  and  something  like 
a  scandal  soon  after  its  erection. 

And  now  that  we  come  to  our  own 
time,  I  must  show  you  first  the  front  of  that 
Church  of  St.  Bartholomew  in  New  York, 
to  which  there  has  been  allusion  already. 
(See  Fig.  13.)  In  its  disposition  it  is  very 
like  to  the  front  of  St.  Gilles,  except  that  it 
is  made  flatter  and  thinner  as  of  necessity. 
It  is  the  same  composition  as  the  porch  of 
the  older  church,  and  even  the  statues  are 
intended  to  be  put  in,  although  the  work 
has  been  delayed  in  that  respect.  I  show 
you  this  as  a  piece  of  the  best  possible  copied 
or  derived  work  in  modern  reproduced  art. 
We  do  not  often  succeed  so  well.  The  re- 
production that  I  speak  of  is  mainly  in  the 
architecture,  but  in  the  sculpture,  too,  there 
are  instances  of  similarity  worthy  of  the 
best  attention.  The  lunette  on  the  left  by 
Herbert  Adams  is  assuredly  based  upon  the 
art  of  Luca  della  Robbia.  The  bronze 
doors  are  among  the  finest  that  exist, 
[189] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

generally  admirable  in  design  and  splendid 
pieces  of  foundry  work,  the  sculpture  and 
mouldings  cast  together  with  no  planting 
on.  Here  is  that  southern  door  with  Mr. 
Adams'  lunette  (Fig.  14),  and  the  whole  of 
the  work  is  by  him.  In  this  picture  also 
is  seen  on  a  larger  scale  one  end  of  the 
greater  frieze,  the  work  of  Mr.  Daniel  C. 
French,  aided  by  Andrew  O'Connor,  Jr., 
who  indeed  appears  to  be  responsible  for  the 
actual  work  of  the  greater  part  of  Mr. 
French's  sculpture  on  this  front.  The  north 
doorway,  of  which  I  have  no  separate  pic- 
ture, is  the  work  of  Mr.  Martini,  and  now 
I  wish  to  show  you  another  composition, 
also  suggested  by  that  church  at  St.  Gilles. 
Here,  however,  (Fig.  15)  you  will  notice 
that  there  were  opportunities  for  doing 
things  on  a  great  scale.  This  porch  is  im- 
measurably more  massive  than  the  neighbor- 
ing parts  of  the  original  church.  It  projects 
boldly  from  the  front  of  the  church,  and  it 
is  solidly  built,  and  casts  deep  and  sombre 
shadows.  The  design  is  in  harmony  with 
these  features.  Nothing  certainly  was  ever 
[190] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

better  done  than  that  treatment  of  each 
separate  pier  as  made  up  of  a  crowd  of  col- 
umns with  here  and  there  a  massive  fluted 
pilaster,  copied,  as  it  were,  from  that  splen- 
did cloister  of  Aries,  of  which  we  have  spoken 
to-day.  Architecturally  this  achievement 
is  far  beyond  the  previous  example  in  dig- 
nity and  splendor;  and  as  for  the  sculpture, 
we  have  side  by  side  these  two  very  curious 
results — that  one  porch  has  come  of  the 
employment  of  very  highly  praised  and  re- 
nowned sculptors,  men  of  the  class  which 
we  rank  as  among  the  most  renowned  of 
artists,  while  the  other  is  the  work  of  a  man 
who  professes  himself  rather  an  architectural 
decorator  and  carver,  and  whose  work  has 
been  the  placing  of  sculpture  in  relation  to 
the  building  in  the  spirit  of  the  work  done 
in  mediaeval  times.  It  is  the  strangest  thing 
to  see  how  nearly  sculpture,  which  pretends 
only  to  be  decorative,  approaches  in  individ- 
ual merit  the  work  of  the  renowned  sculp- 
tors named.  The  consideration,  however, 
of  the  problem  is  out  of  our  reach  at  present, 
and  I  only  wish  to  call  your  attention  to  the 

[191] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

fact  that,  when  you  undertake  sculpture 
combined  with  architecture,  it  is  the  last 
named  art  which  must  talk  first  and  which 
must  impress  itself  upon  the  sculptor. 

The  recently  completed  Appellate  Court 
House  in  New  York  City  has  two  great 
statues  on  pedestals  at  the  steps  of  entrance. 
Other  statues  are  seen  against  the  sky. 
Again,  semi-recumbent  figures  adorn  the 
pediments  of  the  great  windows,  and  a  great 
group  adorns  the  southern  front.  In  this 
way,  you  see,  almost  every  application  of 
free  statuary  to  a  building  has  been  utilized. 
The  sculpture  has  not  a  fair  chance,  because 
the  building  has  been  of  really  unusual  ill 
success.  More  than  once  I  have  taken  some 
architect,  one  of  the  school  to  which  this  de- 
sign belongs,  to  this  corner,  or  to  walk  past  the 
long  front,  and  have  put  to  him  innocently 
the  question  why  the  sculpture  fails  so  utterly 
to  give  its  true  effect,  and  the  answer  has  al- 
ways been  the  same;  the  poor  composition 
of  the  building  destroys  the  best  worth  of 
the  figure-work. 

The  Washington  Congressional  Library, 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

however,  gives  a  partial  relief  to  those  who 
are  longing  for  sculpture  in  modern  build- 
ings. This  (Fig.  1 6)  is  the  foot  of  the 
great  stairway  on  one  side;  and  here  the 
sculpture  is  by  that  same  Philip  Martini, 
whose  work  we  could  not  examine  closely 
in  the  north  door  of  the  New  York  church. 
The  light-bearing  statues  are  in  bronze,  and 
all  the  rest  of  the  work,  including  the  little 
genii,  is  of  marble.  Of  marble,  too,  is  the 
great  cylindrical  newel-post,  and  so  is  the 
hand-rail  that  sweeps  around  it  and  finishes 
by  disappearing  in  its  mass.  And  we  accept 
this  building  as  the  most  important  thing  yet 
done  in  America  in  the  way  of  decorative 
treatment  of  an  interior,  for  the  mosaics  and 
the  paintings  which  we  must  study  in  the 
next  lecture  are  supported  and  helped  by 
the  marble  and  bronze  to  which  the  sculp- 
tor has  given  life. 


[>93] 


LECTURE  VI. 

PAINTING  AS  USED  IN  ARCHI- 
TECTURE.1 

The  relations  of  color-decoration  to  archi- 
tecture are  difficult  to  put  clearly  before  one's 
own  vision  because  of  the  extremely  uneven 
character  of  European  art  in  that  respect. 
Nowhere  will  you  find  a  building  with  color 
decoration  applied  as  generally  and  with  as 
much  desire  for  a  complete  composition  in 
color,  as  to  equal  at  all  the  similar  combi- 
nations in  sculpture,  of  which  we  have  many. 

The  first  building  that  I  shall  show  you 
contains  in  its  interior  a  splendid  scheme  of 
color ;  and  I  might  with  equal  propriety  give 
you  the  interior  of  a  still  larger  and  more 
brilliantly  decorated  building,  St.  Mark's  in 
Venice,  or  the  Cathedral  of  Monreale  in 
Sicily ;  and  still,  with  the  possible  exception 
of  St.  Mark's,  we  should  find  no  building 
which  is  adorned  without  and  within  by  a 

1  Delivered,    April   28,   1904,    at  Fullerton    Memorial  Hall,  The  Art 
Institute   of  Chicago. 

[J94] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

consistent  scheme  of  chromatic  decoration. 
We  know  that  a  Doric  temple  in  Athens  or 
in  Sicily  was  painted  all  over,  as  one  may 
say,  outside.  The  sculpture,  both  in  relief 
and  in  the  round,  received  the  richest  paint- 
ing, but  all  parts  of  the  building  were  treated 
with  a  consistent  scheme  of  decoration  ap- 
plied with  the  brush.  We  do  not  know  of 
what  nature  this  color-harmony  must  have 
been.  We  can  only  guess  at  it;  and  as  to 
the  interior,  simply  we  know  nothing  about 
it  at  all.  We  do  not  even  know  whether 
daylight  was  admitted  to  that  interior  oth- 
erwise than  as  it  shone  through  the  great 
west  door,  and  so  was  reflected  from  the 
pavement  and  the  walls  upon  the  statue  of 
the  goddess.  That  statue  of  the  goddess  it- 
self, of  ivory  and  gold  —  of  what  nature  was 
its  color  scheme?  —  shall  we  agree  with 
those  enthusiasts  who  are  sure  that  the 
Greeks  understood  and  practised  the  art  of 
enamelling  on  metal,  and  that  the  "gold" 
was  not  merely  the  gleaming  and  generally 
yellow  substance  which  we  know  by  that 
name,  but  was  made  into  a  rich  color 

[•95] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

combination  by  the  different  alloys  used  in 
casting  the  metal  and  by  the  application 
of  colored  enamels? 

The  best  thing  for  us  in  this  too  brief 
inquiry,  is  to  abandon  the  insolvable  problem 
set  for  us  by  the  remains  of  Greek  temples, 
and  to  take  up  those  mediaeval  buildings  — 
those  very  early  Christian  shrines  —  which 
are  richly  adorned  in  color.  And  first  the 
church  at  Ravenna,  which  is  called  by  the 
name  of  its  patron  saint,  and  to  distinguish 
it  from  another  of  the  same  dedication,  is 
called  the  New  —  Sant'  Apollinare  Nuovo. 
In  Fig.  i  we  are  standing  in  the  north  aisle 
and  looking  eastward,  and  all  along  the 
south  wall,  above  the  arches  of  the  nave  ar- 
cade, is  a  long  row  —  a  procession  as  it  may 
be  called — of  Christian  martyrs ;  men  draped 
in  priestly  garments  and  marching  eastward 
toward  the  throne  where  Christ  sits,  near  to 
the  chancel  or  the  sacred  centre  of  the 
church.  If  we  should  look  at  the  north 
wall  we  should  see  a  corresponding  row  of 
virgin  martyrs,  twenty-two  female  figures, 
also  moving  eastward.  These  walls  above 
[196] 


CHURCH  OF  S.  APOLL1NARE  NUOVO,  RAVENNA 
Completed  in  the  Sixth  Century  A.  D. 

LECTURE  VI.    FIGURE  i 


CHURCH  OF  S.  VITALE,  RAVENNA 
Mosaic  of  about  500  A.  D. 

LECTURE  VI.    FIOURE  2 


MAUSOLEUM   OF  GALLA   PLACIDIA,  RAVENNA 
Mosaic  in  lunette  beneath  vaulted  roof 

LECTURE  VI.    FIGURE  3 


MAUSOLEUM   OF  GALLA   PLACIDIA,  RAVENNA 
Interior 

LECTURE  VI.    FIGURE  4 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

the  nave  arcade  including  the  spandrels,  as 
they  are  called,  that  is,  the  triangular  spaces 
above  the  arches,  are  covered  with  mosaic 
of  glass  tessera? ;  and  not  only  is  the  proces- 
sion of  saints  or  of  worshippers  wrought  in 
that  material,  but  also  the  figures  of  Fathers 
of  the  Church  and  the  ornamental  patterns 
above. 

At  the  eastern  end  of  the  corresponding 
church  of  Sant'  Apollinare  in  Classe,  outside 
the  walls  of  Ravenna,  the  semi-dome  of  the 
apse,  which  is  cpvered  with  mosaic,  is  filled 
with  the  subject  of  the  benediction  given  to 
the  sheep  of  Christ,  which  in  this  case  is 
pronounced  by  the  saint  to  whom  the  church 
is  dedicated,  a  splendid  decorative  cross  in  a 
circle  above  the  figure  is  accompanied  by 
angels  and  attended  by  other  sheep ;  and  this 
is  assumed  to  stand  for  the  Transfiguration 
of  Christ.  Again,  in  the  wall  above  and  on 
either  side  of  the  arch  the  same  subject  re- 
curs, the  faithful  symbolized  by  figures  of 
sheep;  and  everywhere  there  is  a  free  use 
of  conventional  patterns  of  color  to  serve  as 
frames  and  settings  for  the  whole. 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

The  most  famous  of  the  wonderful  old 
churches  of  Ravenna  is  San  Vitale,  but  un- 
fortunately that  interior  has  been  so  spoiled 
by  repainting  in  the  eighteenth  century  that 
no  knowledge  whatever  is  now  obtainable 
of  its  chromatic  effect  within.  We  have 
in  its  original  condition  only  the  chancel,  a 
short,  square  member  with  the  apse  beyond, 
forming  a  space  about  twice  as  long  or  deep 
as  it  is  wide.  The  walls  and  roof  are  in- 
deed covered  with  the  original  early  mosaics, 
and  in  Fig.  2  is  shown  a  detail  of  this  — 
three  small  arches  carried  on  columns  and 
built  in  beneath  a  huge  discharging  arch. 
Please  note  the  relation  which  it  bears  to  the 
other  surfaces  around.  The  pictorial  com- 
position in  the  great  tympanum  itself,  as  you 
see,  has  to  do  with  the  Christian  sacrifice,  and 
it  is  personified  here  by  those  Old  Testament 
characters,  which  were  taken  by  the  early 
church  to  stand  as  the  precursors  of  the 
High  Priest,  Christ.  Abel  on  the  left,  Mel- 
chizedek  on  the  right,  are  offering  each  his 
sacrifice ;  for  Abel,  you  will  remember,  was 
he  who  sacrificed  the  living  creatures  of  his 
[198] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

flock,  while  Cain  offered  the  fruits  of  the 
earth  only,  and  Melchizedek  is  especially 
named  as  being  the  "Priest  of  the  Most 
High  God."  That  mosaic-covered  tym- 
panum is  on  the  north  wall  of  the  chancel, 
directly  opposite  the  high  altar.  A  little 
farther  east,  on  the  wall  where  the  rounding 
of  the  apse  begins,  is  a  scene  of  mingled 
imperial  and  religious  state  and  splendor. 
The  Emperor  with  four  of  his  great  minis- 
ters occupies  the  centre  of  that  composition. 
On  his  left  (or  the  right  of  the  spectator) 
are  servants  of  the  church,  and  on  his  right 
are  the  warriors  who,  it  is  assumed,  are  to 
fight  for  Christianity  against  the  pagan  and 
against  the  heretic.  And  we  have  to  note 
in  this  pictorial  composition  the  continuance 
of  that  spirit  which  we  noted  in  the  statues 
of  the  west  front  of  Chartres.  There  is  the 
same  readiness  to  sacrifice  everything  to  the 
dignity  of  the  composition.  The  lines  must 
be  severe,  formal,  nearly  vertical ;  the  surfaces 
must  be  treated  with  grave  and  severe  color- 
ing ;  and  the  use  of  flat  patterns  of  peculiarly 
ornamental  character  replaces  all  landscape 

['99] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

background  or  similar  completion  of  the 
design.  You  will  understand  that  this  is 
not  mentioned  here  as  the  final  or  as  the 
only  possible  treatment,  for  I  can  show  you 
compositions  in  which  the  mosaic  designs 
are  treated  more  freely.  Still,  it  is  on  this 
general  principle  that  mosaic  has  always 
been  treated  when  good  taste  was  the  rule 
and  when  its  peculiarities  as  a  medium  were 
kept  clearly  in  mind.  That  was  poor  mosaic 
which  was  made  in  the  eighteenth  century 
in  close  imitation  of  paintings  of  the  great 
masters  of  a  preceding  epoch. 

The  Church  of  SS.  Nazario  and  Celso 
is  the  name  given  by  the  later  clerical 
authorities  to  the  old  mausoleum  of  the 
Empress  Galla  Placidia ;  and  that  little  build- 
ing remains,  with  its  three  great  sarcophagi 
standing  in  the  three  arms  of  the  cross. 

This  picture  that  I  show  you  (Fig.  3)  is 
the  lunette  at  the  end  of  one  of  those  arms 
with  the  same  familiar  subject  of  the  Shep- 
herd and  the  Sheep.  You  will  note  that 
the  roof  or  vault  in  this  picture  is  that  which 
I  showed  you  for  the  sake  of  its  pattern  in 
[200] 


H  i— 


^   C 
2.  cr. 


-      B  C 
n      *^  ^ 


g 

z  n 

•" 


t  o 


' 


z 

1= 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

the  fourth  of  these  lectures;  but  it  is  very 
true  that  one  of  the  difficulties  in  discussing 
the  nature  of  art  which  depends  chiefly 
upon  color,  is  found  in  this  very  opacity  of 
our  glass  pictures.  The  light  of  the  lan- 
tern cannot  be  forced  through  the  dark 
surfaces. 

This  picture  (Fig.  4)  shows  a  general 
view  of  the  interior  of  that  little  church, 
for  it  is  really  very  small.  The  width  of 
the  nave  and  the  transept  cannot  exceed 
twenty  feet,  if  it  equals  that.  Two  hundred 
persons,  all  standing,  would  crowd  the  little 
church  in  a  disagreeable  way. 

The  square  domes  at  the  crossing  of  gal- 
leries in  the  Archbishop's  palace  at  Ravenna 
have,  on  the  vault,  interesting  angelic  figures 
with  upraised  hands,  and  wrought,  of  course, 
upon  a  domical  or  rounded  surface — part 
of  the  inside  of  a  sphere.  Therefore,  the 
figures  are  not  to  be  taken  as  if  they  were 
really  flat.  They  are  designed  with  singular 
skill  and  propriety  for  the  generally  hollow 
concave  surfaces. 

And  now  a  brief  allusion  to  two  rather 
[201] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

curious  forms  of  color  decoration  in  use  at 
different  times  during  the  Middle  Ages. 
They  are  all  Italian,  because  in  Italy  there 
has  been  less  destruction  of  the  monuments 
of  a  period  which  afterwards  passed  for  bar- 
baric and  tasteless.  The  contemptuous  judg- 
ment of  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth 
centuries  was  not  allowed  to  prevail  in  the 
churches  there  so  far  as  to  destroy  the  re- 
mains of  earlier  art. 

These  curious  labyrinths,  shown  in  Fig.  5, 
are  not  indeed  unknown  in  the  pavements 
of  French  churches;  but  those  of  Italy  are 
equally  attractive  and  elaborate  and  have 
preserved  their  original  aspect,  whereas  the 
French  ones  have  been  restored  and  relaid 
and  generally  freshened  up.  That  comes, 
you  see,  of  there  being  too  much  prosperity 
in  France  —  too  much  money  to  spend. 
The  impoverished  Italy  of  the  seventeenth 
and  eighteenth  and  early  nineteenth  cen- 
turies could  not  undertake  such  costly  re- 
pairs. One  of  these  labyrinths  is  in  that 
same  church  of  San  Vitale  of  which  we 
have  heard  so  much  already.  Another  is 
[202] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

in  the  Cathedral  of  Lucca ;  and  it  is  to  this 
that  belongs  the  Latin  inscription  according 
to  which  it  appears  that  the  word  "laby- 
rinth "  is  to  be  taken  as  the  feminine  article 
"la"  and  the  long  word  beginning  with 
"B."  The  thirteenth-century  artist  really 
thought  that  "la  Berinthus"  was  the  proper 
and  satisfactory  way  of  writing  the  Latin- 
ized Greek  term,  and  he  followed  it  with  a 
pretty  little  reference  to  the  father  of  laby- 
rinth, the  Greek  Daedalus.  You  understand, 
of  course,  that  the  significance  of  the  laby- 
rinth is  that  it  exemplifies  the  difficulty  which 
the  Christian  finds  in  reaching  the  goal  of 
his  hopes.  The  path  which  he  is  to  fol- 
low is  sometimes  marked  by  a  band  of  tri- 
angles all  pointing  one  way,  as  in  the  ex- 
ample taken  from  San  Vitale,  but  more  often 
it  is  a  mere  black  band. 

The  other  single  example  which  I  have  to 
show  you  is  the  painted  roof  of  the  Cathe- 
dral at  Messina  in  Sicily.  (Fig.  6.)  The  sur- 
face across  the  top  of  the  picture  is  the  under 
side  of  that  lowered  part  of  the  ceiling, 
which  is  boxed  down  to  cover  the  starting 

[203] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

of  the  roof  timbers  from  the  wall.  You 
will  see  projecting  from  this,  the  under  side 
of  one  of  the  great  tie-beams  of  the  wooden 
roof,  and  the  space  on  either  side  of  that 
tie-beam  is  the  ceiling  in  boards  above  and 
beyond.  You  will  see  how  every  part  is 
covered  with  the  most  elaborate  painted 
patterns.  You  will  easily  understand  how 
impossible  it  is  to  draw  up  a  scheme  for  the 
classification  of  these  different  forms  of 
chromatic  decoration.  It  would  take  a 
volume  to  express  that  thought;  and  I  am 
compelled  to  go  on  to  the  mediaeval  adorn- 
ment of  interior  walls. 

This  picture  (Fig.  7)  is  the  west  front 
of  the  famous  cathedral  at  Le  Puy  in  central 
France.  According  to  a  system  much  more 
common  in  Italy  than  in  the  north,  the  front 
is  designed  in  an  abstract  way;  nor  is  the 
designer  ashamed  of  the  fact  that  his  flanking 
gables  do  not  correspond  with  the  aisles  or 
flanking  parts  of  the  interior.  He  has  taken 
from  the  plan  of  the  church  with  its  broader 
and  higher  nave  and  its  too  subordinate 
aisles  only  the  central  idea  —  the  triple 

[204] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

division ;  and  it  has  not  worried  him  that  his 
aisle-roofs  did  not  come  as  high  as  he  de- 
sired to  put  his  side  gables.  He  has  let  the 
sky  show  through  the  openings  of  these 
without  the  slightest  disguise.  The  very 
beautiful  composition  in  stone  of  three  col- 
ors, growing  more  and  more  elaborate  as 
the  front  climbs  against  the  sky,  replaces, 
as  you  see,  all  treatment  by  means  of  sculp- 
ture, near  as  this  front  is,  geographically,  to 
the  magnificent  sculpture  of  the  Roman- 
esque churches  farther  north.  It  has  taken 
nothing  from  them  and  is  content  with  its 
effect  of  color. 

So  in  the  famous  and  really  lovely  church 
of  Notre-Dame-du-Port  at  Clermont-Fer- 
rand, the  inlay  is  used  with  more  reserve 
and  with  excellent  taste.  The  octagonal 
tower  shows  only  the  tympanums  of  the 
arches  treated  with  color,  but  in  the  little 
square  tower  which  I  show  you  (Fig.  8) 
the  decoration  is  carried  further.  In  the 
chancel  and  transept  of  that  admirable 
church,  you  may  see  the  true  origin  of  much 
of  the  interesting  American  work  to  which 
[205] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

we  give  the  name  of  Richardson  without 
asking  too  closely  whether  he  was  really 
the  designer  of  all  of  it.  However,  as  a 
matter  of  comparison  with  the  French  origi- 
nals, here  is  Richardson's  own  church  in 
Boston  (Fig.  9),  the  one  which  made  his 
celebrity.  And  you  will  see  how  closely 
the  French  feeling  of  the  twelfth  century 
was  reproduced,  or,  if  you  wish,  to  use  a 
less  complimentary  phrase,  was  copied,  at 
the  close  of  the  nineteenth  century.  The 
square  blunt  tower  to  the  left  has  gone.  It 
has  been  replaced  by  the  completion  of  that 
west  end,  carried  out  at  the  time  when  the 
great  porch  was  built — that  porch  of  which 
we  spoke  in  the  last  lecture. 

In  the  fourteenth  century  the  Floren- 
tines, who  had  been  as  reluctant  two  hundred 
years  before  as  any  of  the  Italians  to  accept 
the  Gothic  style  as  the  northern  builders 
created  it,  had  adopted  this  curious  com- 
promise. They  built  in  what  was  the  old 
Gothic  system,  and  they  carried  it  out  in 
the  pointed  arches  for  the  windows  and 
doors,  but  in  every  other  way  they  kept  and 

[206] 


TRINITY  CHURCH,  FROM  THE  SOUTHEAST, 
BOSTON,   MASSACHUSETTS 

LECTURE  VI.    FIGURE  9 


DETAIL  OF  NORTH   FLANK.  OF  CATHEDRAL, 
FLORENCE,  ITALY 

LECTURE  VI.    FIGURE  10 


CLOISTER  OF  SANTA   MARIA   NOVELLA,  FLORENCE 
LECTURE  VI.    FIGURE  11 


DETAIL  OF  PAINTING  SHOWN  IN   FIGURE   11 
LECTURE  VI.    FIGURE  12 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

even  carried  further,  the  southern  notion  of 
smooth  wall  surfaces  treated  in  color,  as 
opposed  to  the  northern  idea  of  a  building 
without  flat  walls,  but  made  up  of  slender 
supports  —  the  space  between  them  filled 
by  colored  glass. 

This  time  I  show  you  (Fig.  10)  a  part 
of  the  northern  flank  of  the  Cathedral  of 
Florence,  and,  included  in  it,  the  western- 
most of  the  three  doorways  which  lead  into 
the  church.  Here  the  brick  walls  are 
sheathed  with  thin  plates  of  marble;  and 
around  the  windows  and  the  doorways  the 
decoration  is  required  to  be  the  richest  and 
the  most  concentrated.  This  sheathing  cul- 
minates in  the  jambs  and  in  the  archivolts 
of  the  doorway  and  windows,  and  in  the 
gables  above  them,  in  beautiful  mosaic  of 
small  pieces  of  marble.  This  decoration 
is  much  too  minute  to  be  seen  in  the 
photograph.  In  the  beautiful  bell-tower 
the  decoration  is  carried  still  further, 
because  the  inlay  in  color  pattern  is  eked 
out,  strengthened  as  it  were,  by  carving  in 
low  relief.  Like  that  Japanese  box  which 
[207] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

I  showed  you  a  week  ago  with  its  little  bats 
in  black  horn,  each  bat  wrought  in  relief  in 
the  most  delicate  fashion,  so  here  in  the 
bell-tower  the  effect  of  a  color  pattern  is 
enhanced  by  raising  a  part  of  the  design  in 
carved  relief.  The  feeling  for  such  decora- 
tive inlay  continued  into  the  time  of  the 
Renaissance,  although  it  disappeared  sooner 
in  Florence,  lingering  much  longer  and 
produced  more  effectively  in  Venice  and  in 
the  cities  under  Venetian  control.  The 
Renaissance  church  of  S.  Maria  Novella  is 
the  latest  in  date  of  all  the  pieces  of  such 
work  that  we  have  in  Tuscany ;  and  in  the 
front  of  that  church  the  whole  scheme  of 
the  exterior  is  based  upon  the  decorative 
pattern  in  color.  The  marbles  of  different 
shades  are  used  here  just  as  they  were  in 
the  Cathedral  of  Florence,  but  with  the 
semi-classical  spirit  visible  in  the  patterns, 
whereas  those  of  the  Cathedral  retained 
their  full  mediaeval  character. 

Still  the  most  important  part  of  archi- 
tectural work  in  color  is,  for  us,  that  which 
is  done  by  painting  on  walls  and  ceilings, 

[208] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

and,  as  we  have  had  occasion  to  learn  be- 
fore, that  painting  which  is  done  with  the 
deliberate  purpose  of  narrating  or  describing 
—  that  which  we  call  commonly  "  painting  " 
without  qualification,  or  the  painting  of 
pictures.  Here  in  the  cloister  of  that  same 
Church  of  Santa  Maria  Novella  (Fig.  1 1)  is 
a  combination  of  painting  in  mere  flat  pat- 
tern and  the  painting  of  pictures  of  historic 
or  religious  significance,  which  marks  that 
period  when  pure  adornment  had  reached 
its  culminating  point  in  Europe,  while  at 
the  same  time  the  painting  of  expression 
and  representation  was  approaching  its  per- 
fect splendor. 

The  picture  on  the  left  is  ascribed  to 
Giotto,  but  I  think  not  with  sufficient 
authority.  It  seems  to  be  the  work  of  one 
of  his  followers;  that  is,  of  a  man  of 
greater  acquired  knowledge  and  of  less  vig- 
orous purpose.  We  shall  see  that  picture  in 
a  moment,  but  look  first  at  the  general 
effect  proposed  by  the  designer.  You  will 
certainly  understand  that  these  patterns, 
which  I  have  praised  by  implication,  are  not 
[209] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

• 

in  reality  as  sharp  in  contrast  of  color  as  the 
black  and  white  makes  them.  They  do  not 
injure  the  picture  by  contrast.  Before  we 
leave  this  view  let  me  remind  you  that  the 
famous  Spanish  Chapel,  of  which  we  must 
speak  in  a  moment,  opens  out  of  this  cloister. 
The  door  to  it  is  behind  us  as  we  stand  here 
looking  up  one  arm  of  the  cloister,  and  on 
our  right  is  the  open  arch  which  leads  to 
the  green  space  within. 

In  this  picture  (Fig.  12),  the  Presenta- 
tion of  the  Virgin  in  the  Temple,  you  will 
note  the  type  of  composition,  the  distribu- 
tion of  the  parts,  the  way  of  telling  the 
story,  which  remained  the  accepted  one  for 
two  centuries  at  least.  You  will  find  it  in 
Titian's  magnificent  picture  in  the  Acad- 
emy of  Venice ;  you  will  find  it  in  Tinto- 
retto's no  less  magnificent  picture  in  the 
Church  of  Santa  Maria  del  Orto. 

As  to  the  Spanish  Chapel,  it  is  one  of 
the  most  interesting  rooms,  artistically,  even 
in  Italy,  for  it  is  a  beautiful  specimen  of 
Italian  Gothic  vaulting,  a  square  room  of 
sufficient  size  to  enable  one  to  see  the 

[210] 


FRESCO   IN  THE  SPANISH   CHAPEL,  CLOISTER  OF  SANTA 
MARIA  NOVELLA,  FLORENCE 

LECTURE  VI.    FIGURE  13 


THE  SUPPER   IN  THE   HOUSE  OF   LEV1 ;  CENTRAL  GROUP 
Paul  Veronese  (1528-1588) 

LECTURE  VI     FIGURE  14 


Copyright  by  Curtis  and  Cameron,  Publishers,  Boston 

CONCORD  BRIDGE 
In  Memorial  Hall  of  State  House,  Boston,  Mass.    Edward  Simmons  (b.  1852) 

LECTURE  VI.    FIGURE  15 


WALL  OF  A   DRAWING-ROOM,  NEW  YORK  CITY 
LECTURE  VI.    FIGURE  16 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

paintings  perfectly,  and  so  adorned  with  those 
paintings  that  vault  and  walls  work  together 
in  perfect  harmony.  There  is  nowhere  a 
more  faultless  example  of  how  an  interior 
may  be  made  glorious  by  painting,  and  its 
true  artistic  character  shown  for  the  first 
time,  as  it  were,  by  such  painting,  while  the 
painting  itself  is  satisfactorily  lighted.  The 
wall  above  the  altar,  the  north  wall,  oppo- 
site the  doorway  which  enters  it  from  the 
cloister,  is  adorned  with  the  great  picture 
of  the  Crucifixion.  On  the  west  wall  is 
the  still  more  important  picture  which  I 
show  you  now.  (Fig.  13.)  This  is  a  sym- 
bolic design,  expressing,  in  a  way  too  recon- 
dite to  be  followed  here,  the  relations  of 
society  and  life,  intelligence  and  morals,  to 
the  world  of  religion.  It  is  commonly 
called  the  Triumph  of  Saint  Thomas  Aqui- 
nas. But,  of  course,  while  such  work  as 
this  is  of  faultless  effect  as  mural  decoration, 
and  has  quite  immeasurable  interest  for  us 
as  expressing  the  religious  and  philosophical 
thoughts  of  the  age, — an  age  peculiarly  sus- 
ceptible and  refined  in  its  tone  of  thought, 

[211] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

—  it  is  still  not  as  vigorous  painting  as  that 
which  was  to  follow.  That  is  always  a  very 
difficult  proposition  to  make  clear  to  the 
mind,  to  one's  own  intelligence,  and  even 
more  difficult  to  express  in  words  —  the 
strength,  the  value,  the  profound  interest  of 
the  early  work  which  is  not  as  yet  based 
upon  perfect  artistic  knowledge.  Thus  to 
many  a  student  of  painting  and  of  architec- 
ture, that  picture  which  we  are  now  leaving 
behind  us  is  a  more  precious  monument  than 
the  superb  work  known  to  all  of  us  as  the 
fresco  by  Raphael  in  the  Vatican,  The 
Burning  of  the  Suburb  (Incendio  del  Borgo). 
In  that  picture  everything  that  art  can  do 
for  beauty  in  the  way  of  admirable  compo- 
sition is  done.  Composition  in  line,  com- 
position in  mass,  are  produced  with  faultless 
accuracy;  moreover,  a  notable  tradition  of 
the  church  is  preserved,  and  again  the  nat- 
ural desire  of  every  great  draughtsman  to 
represent  the  nude  figure  in  vigorous  action 
is  made  possible  —  even  necessary  in  appear- 
ance—  by  the  subject,  the  sudden  outburst 
of  fire,  the  sudden  alarm,  the  beseeching 

[212] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

multitude  who  address  the  Pope,  all  work 
toward  the  result  which  Raphael  had  most 
in  mind.  It  was  quite  indifferent  to  him 
that  the  picture  is  conceived  in  an  impossi- 
ble way,  the  flames  flickering  where  there  is 
nothing  to  burn,  the  people  collecting 
water  in  Greek  vases  of  beautiful  type,  but 
in  a  most  ineffective  and  impossible  way, 
the  whole  conception  non-realistic.  A 
complete  contrast  is  seen  in  one  of  those 
tremendous  Venetian  conceptions,  the  fa- 
mous Crucifixion  of  Tintoretto's  which  is 
placed  in  one  of  the  smaller  rooms  of  the 
Scuola  di  San  Rocco  in  Venice.  Now,  it  is 
a  truism,  an  accepted  dictum,  that  the  oil- 
paintings  of  the  Venetians  were  not  as  effec- 
tive mural  decoration  as  the  frescos  of  the 
Florentines;  and  if  we  understand  exactly 
what  is  meant  by  the  true  worth  of  paint- 
ing, that  dictum  is  to  be  accepted  to  the 
full.  One  would  rather  adorn  a  stately  hall 
with  such  paintings  as  those  of  the  Floren- 
tine Chapel  than  with  even  the  more 
tranquil  paintings  of  the  Venetians  —  cer- 
tainly rather  than  with  the  tumultuous  and 

C2I3] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

realistic  composition  we  are  considering — 
a  picture  in  which  for  the  first  time  in 
Christian  art  one  meets  with  a  studied  ren- 
dering of  the  Crucifixion  as  it  might  have 
taken  place.  On  the  other  hand  the  pic- 
ture of  which  this  group  (Fig.  14)  is  the 
central  feature,  the  magnificent  Paul  Veron- 
ese in  the  Academy  of  Venice,  called  the 
Supper  at  the  House  of  Levi,  and  more 
generally  called  "The  Green  Man,"  from 
the  splendid  figure  which  does  not  appear  in 
this  group  before  you;  this  group,  I  say, 
shows  what  the  Venetian  was  when  he  was 
painting  with  almost  a  simple  decorative  pur- 
pose. There  are  those  of  us  who  think  that 
Paul  Veronese  was  the  greatest  painter  that 
Europe  has  ever  seen,  and  this  because  of 
the  unfailing  serenity  with  which  those 
superb  compositions,  perfect  in  line  and  in 
mass,  perfect  also  in  color,  succeed  one  an- 
other as  we  follow  his  tranquil  and  hard- 
working life.  It  is  hard  to  say  that  any 
mural  painting  can  be  better  than  this — 
and  yet  here  again  there  is  room  to  ask  that 
the  hall  to  be  adorned  shall  at  all  events  be 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

planned  with  reference  to  the  unmatched 
stateliness  of  the  decorations  which  are  to 
be  given  to  it.  There  are  few  rooms  which 
such  painting  would  not  dwarf. 

Now,  in  our  modern  art,  there  is  one  man 
who,  more  than  any  other  painter,  has  pre- 
served the  tranquil  perfection  which  marked 
the  greatness  of  the  Italian  sixteenth  century. 
Pierre  Puvis  de  Chavannes  is  represented  in 
America  by  one  very  noble  composition, 
the  Muses  rising  to  greet  the  Aspiring  Soul, 
or  a  subject  of  that  character,  a  painting 
which  covers  the  wall  at  the  head  of  the 
great  stairway  in  the  Boston  public  library. 
(Frontispiece.)  And  this  picture  shown  after 
a  Paul  Veronese,  is  to  us  as  if  we  returned 
to  the  earlier  epoch  of  the  Spanish  Chapel 
—  so  grave,  so  simple  in  its  composition,  so 
subdued  in  its  coloring  is  the  modern's 
work.  But  as  a  piece  of  mural  decoration 
there  is  this  to  be  said  and  insisted  on,  that 
the  very  dark  background  with  the  diaph- 
anous figures  floating  in  the  air  and  relieved 
against  the  darkness  is  notably  a  finer  thing 
than  the  white,  or  nearly  white,  background 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

with  figures  relieved  upon  it  in  strong 
light  and  shade.  The  solid  parapet  in  front 
of  you  conceals  nothing  of  importance  in  the 
painting,  but  it  does  conceal  the  lowest  edge 
of  it,  and  the  space  between  that  marble 
wall  and  the  painted  surface  beyond  may  be 
twenty  feet;  so  that  the  columns  that  you 
see,  relieved  against  the  darker  background 
made  by  the  picture  and  the  vault  which 
they  carry,  mark  the  width  of  the  passage- 
way between.  The  smaller  panels  are  sym- 
bolical, one  of  pastoral  poetry,  the  next  one 
of  epic  poetry,  and  they  occupy  the  side 
walls  of  the  same  square  hall  in  which  the 
stair  goes  up.  It  is  curious  to  see  the  de- 
termination of  the  artist  to  relieve  his  figures 
in  a  generally  pale  chord  of  color  against  a 
somewhat  darker  background.  They  have, 
however,  no  very  close  relation  to  the  form 
of  the  hall.  Except  in  the  case  of  the  great 
painting  of  the  Muses,  these  pictures  might 
be  in  any  large  and  stately  room,  and  in 
fact  would  be  better  were  they  not  quite  so 
far  above  the  eye.  It  is  but  seldom  that  a 
room  fits  its  painted  decorations,  and  seldom 

[216] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

that  the  paintings  fill  the  room  as  perfectly 
as  in  the  case  of  the  vaulted  hall  at  Florence. 
And  now  take  another  instance  of  the 
tendency  to  paint  historical  and  narrative 
pictures  on  walls  without  considering  too 
closely  their  strictly  mural  nature.  This 
(Fig.  15)  is  the  very  splendid  painting  by 
Edward  Simmons,  in  the  State  House  in 
Boston,  one  of  four  pictures  which  by  ex- 
press order  were  painted  to  deal  with  scenes 
in  the  patriotic  history  of  Massachusetts. 
The  artist  has  himself  explained  his  strong 
feeling  for  the  situation  as  it  really  was.  It 
was  an  early  spring  that  year,  so  that  even 
when  the  fight  at  Concord  Bridge  occurred, 
the  whole  country  was  bright  with  the  ten- 
der green  of  the  coming  vegetation.  The 
topography  is  understood  to  be  accurate. 
Now,  there  are  many  ways  of  representing 
a  battle,  and  an  interesting  screed  might  be 
delivered  on  the  comparative  fitness  of  these 
different  ways  of  telling  the  story;  but  in 
this  one  there  seems  to  be  peculiar  fitness  in 
leaving  to  imagination  the  almost  unpaint- 
able  struggle  itself,  to  leave  that  wrapped  in 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

white  smoke  through  which  flashes  the  blaze 
of  infantry  musket  and  farmer's  rifle,  and  to 
concentrate  the  attention  of  the  observer  on 
the  rallying  crowd  of  villagers  who  hurry 
down  the  road  to  the  scene  of  the  conflict. 
If  it  is  not  a  perfectly  understood  mural 
decoration,  this  is  because  it  is  so  thoroughly 
realized  as  a  historical  picture.  The  depth, 
the  perspective,  the  range  of  country  from 
the  distant  hill  to  the  near  foreground  —  all 
this  on  the  one  hand ;  and  the  vigor  of  move- 
ment, even  the  violence  of  action,  on  the 
part  of  the  nearer  figures,  all  tend  to  remove 
it  somewhat  out  of  the  sphere  of  mural 
painting  into  that  of  the  historical  gallery. 
But  this,  you  will  understand,  is  said  by  way 
of  hypercriticism — there  is  no  reason  why 
one  should  not  enjoy  the  painting  as  heartily 
on  the  wall  of  the  circular  hall  in  which  it 
is  found  as  if  it  hung  in  a  gallery,  while 
again,  the  hall  is  the  richer  for  the  possession 
of  such  a  work  of  art. 

I  have  now  to  ask  you  to  consider  how 
we  decorate  rooms  when  such  splendid  ap- 
pliances are  not  allowed  us;  and  first  consider 

[2,8] 


WALL  OF  SITTING-ROOM,  NEW  YORK  CITY 
LECTURE  VI.    FIGURE  17 


I'ANEL   FOR   MURAL    DECORATION 
C.  C.  Coleman 


LECTURE  VI.    FIGURE  18 


HALL  IN  LIBRARY  OF  CONGRESS,  WASHINGTON,  D.  C. 
LECTURE  VI.    FIGURE  20 


CORRIDOR   IN   LIBRARY  OF  CONGRESS,  WASHINGTON,  D.  C. 
LECTURE  VI.    FIGURE  21 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

the  necessity  of  sticking  to  the  general 
lay-out  of  the  room  as  our  main  theme. 
Here,  for  instance  (Fig.  16),  is  the  design 
for  a  drawing-room  in  New  York,  which 
design,  indeed,  was  carried  out.  The  wood- 
work— consisting  of  door-trim  and  window- 
trim,  and  of  the  mirror  frame,  so  arranged  as 
to  correspond  with  the  doorway  and  also 
with  the  mantelpiece,  which  is  inclosed  in 
the  mirror  frame,  as  you  see  —  is  all  framed 
of  white  holly  with  the  panels  of  doorway 
and  mirror  in  mahogany,  very  delicately 
carved  in  low  relief.  The  carving  takes  the 
form  of  a  continuous  little  vine  climbing 
each  vertical  member.  But  in  the  window- 
trim  no  such  broad  panelled  frame  is  used,  only 
a  narrow  group  of  mouldings  of  the  white 
wood  with  a  slight  narrow  band  of  mahogany 
to  serve  as  "echo,"  and  to  bind  the  room 
together  in  design.  Now,  to  carry  out  the 
wall  decoration,  the  whole  surface  is  divided 
up  into  squares,  each  one  filled  with  a  deli- 
cately suggested  pattern  only  slightly  relieved 
in  color  from  the  background,  and  above 
this  is  a  frieze  of  much  stronger  coloring, 
[219] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

repeating  in  paler  tints  the  creamy  white  and 
dull  red  of  the  woodwork.  The  little  sugges- 
tions of  leafage  and  tree-form  with  birds 
shown  in  the  panels  of  this  frieze  are  in  the 
working  scheme  wrought  into  almost  real- 
istic effects  of  treetops,  and  of  birds  that, 
indeed,  seem  solid  enough.  In  this  case  there 
is  no  attempt,  as  you  see,  to  provide  for  the 
hanging  of  pictures.  This  drawing-room 
was  intended  to  be  complete  in  itself;  but 
take  this  other  case  (Fig.  17),  the  case  of 
a  large  living-room  in  which  it  was  in- 
tended to  house  a  great  many  works  of  art 
hung  on  the  walls, —  water-colors,  and  now 
and  then  a  smaller  painting,  and  perhaps  a 
number  of  etchings.  You  see  there  is  a 
simple  dado  of  dark  wood;  and  above  that 
the  surface  of  flock  paper,  or  velvet  paper  as 
it  is  called  nowadays,  affords  a  faultless  back- 
ground for  the  drawings  to  be  hung  upon  it. 
They  might  be  crowded  much  closer  than 
they  are  shown  here.  The  band  of  back- 
ground finishes  at  the  top  with  a  row  of  those 
Japanese  colored  woodcuts,  which  were 
cheap  enough  at  the  time  when  this  design 

[220] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

was  made,  and  which  can  still  be  bought  at 
reasonable  prices  if  one  is  fortunate;  and 
above  this  again  a  very  rich  flowered  French 
paper  was  used.  In  practice  this  scheme 
was  modified;  it  was  thought  necessary  to 
increase  the  width  of  the  background  for 
pictures,  and  accordingly  the  Japanese  frieze 
disappeared,  the  band  of  velvet  paper  was 
made  higher,  and  a  group  of  wooden  mould- 
ings alone  separated  it  from  the  very  rich  and 
beautifully  composed  flowered  surface  above, 
of  which  the  suggested  figure  in  the  photo- 
graph gives  no  idea  at  all.  The  complete 
success  of  the  room  was  partly  dependent  upon 
that  wall-paper,  which  was,  indeed,  a  remark- 
able piece  of  modern  designing — its  discovery 
at  the  right  time  a  real  stroke  of  good  for- 
tune. It  would  have  been  feasible  to  have 
had  such  a  paper  made  to  order;  but  the 
cost  of  it  in  America  with  nine  blocks  to 
have  cut  and  used  in  printing  would  have 
been  prohibitory.  This  would  be  the  way 
to  proceed  if  you  clearly  understood  that 
your  purpose  was  to  show  to  the  best  ad- 
vantage your  valuable  prints  and  drawings; 
[221] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

but  now  look  at  Fig.  1 8,  to  see  Charles  Cole- 
man's  notion  of  how  to  make  the  elaborate 
color  compositions  themselves,  the  repre- 
sentative paintings  themselves,  a  part  of  the 
wall.  These  that  I  have  to  show  you  are 
some  of  his  compositions  painted  lately  in  oil 
and  intended  for  mural  work.  The  frames, 
indeed,  are  not  what  he  would  choose  —  he 
desires  to  see  the  pictures  framed  into  the 
panelling.  In  the  first  one,  as  you  see,  he  has 
represented  a  small  oleander  tree  growing 
in  a  very  beautiful  bronze  pot,  and  beside  it 
some  branches  of  another  flowering  plant  in 
a  Chinese  vase.  In  the  oblong  picture 
(Fig.  19),  the  same  bronze  pot  does  duty, 
used  this  time  as  the  receptacle  for  water 
and  branches  of  a  flowering  tree;  while 
its  very  beautiful  cover  lies  beside  it,  and 
a  saucer  and  an  ornamental  glass  carry 
other  blossoms  of  the  same  tree.  The  dec- 
orative sense,  you  see,  is  very  strong,  and 
in  each  case  the  artist  has  used  his  cipher 
in  a  fashion  to  truly  aid  the  decorative  effect, 
which  in  the  case  of  the  oblong  picture  is 
enhanced  by  the  very  splendid  eastern  stuff 

[222] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

which  forms  the  background.  That  cipher, 
you  will  perceive,  is  merely  the  three  initial 
letters  of  his  name  turned  into  crescents  and 
interlaced ;  all  with  a  kind  of  reminiscence  of 
Diane  de  Poitiers.  And  now  see  in  Fig.  20 
how,  in  very  recent  times,  these  decorative 
appliances,  which  we  have  dealt  with,  work 
out  when  used  together.  This  is  in  the 
Library  of  Congress  in  Washington,  the 
northernmost  corridor  on  the  ground  floor, 
the  great  stair  being  behind  us  and  on  our 
right.  The  lower  wall  and  the  floor  are 
not  now  engaging  our  attention;  they  are 
of  simple  veined  marble  and  of  simple  mo- 
saic. But  the  vault  is  covered  with  mosaic 
in  a  very  rich  and  fairly  successful  decor- 
ative pattern,  and  the  lunettes  are  filled  by 
the  paintings  of  Charles  Sprague  Pearce. 
The  large  picture  opposite  us  is  called  The 
Family;  the  lunettes  on  the  left  are  filled 
with  the  several  subjects  —  Religion  first  on 
the  left,  Labor,  Study,  and  Recreation.  The 
first  of  the  series,  Religion,  is  not  visible  in 
the  picture  we  are  just  leaving ;  it  is  a  beau- 
tiful composition  and  a  beautiful  thought. 
[223] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

Here  again  (Fig.  21)  is  one  of  the  long 
corridors  in  that  richly  adorned  building, 
and  the  lunettes  here,  which  are  faintly  seen 
on  the  left,  are  all  filled  by  the  paintings 
of  Walter  McEwen.  You  get  from  this 
picture  a  fairly  good  idea  of  how  such  highly 
adorned  passages  tell  in  effect  when  they  are 
carried  out  with  complete  control  of  ma- 
terial; with  this  exception,  that  the  photo- 
graph betrays  us  a  little  and  makes  the  blacks 
and  the  whites  too  sharp  in  contrast  and  too 
aggressive. 

To  close  my  lecture,  and  with  it  this 
course,  we  will  speak  of  the  latest  of  those 
mural  paintings  by  Sargent  which  have  been 
put  up  at  different  times  in  the  Boston  Pub- 
lic Library.  This  picture,  reproduced  in 
Fig.  22,  was  in  place  in  October,  1903, 
when  I  saw  it  with  absolute  astonishment 
and  with  a  feeling  that  at  last  the  country 
had  been  so  favored  as  to  possess  a  really 
superb  piece  of  mural  decoration.  In  that 
way  it  is  one  of  the  finest  things  of  mod- 
ern times,  able  to  hold  its  own  against  any 
composition  of  the  nineteenth  or  twentieth 
[224] 


From  a  Copley  print,  copyright,  1903,  by  Curtis  and  Cameron,  Publishers,  Boston 

MURAL   FAINTING  IN  PUBLIC  LIBRARY,  BOSTON,  MASS 
John  Singer  Sargent,    (b.  1856) 

LECTURE  VI.    FIGURE  22 


PANEL  FOR   MURAL  DECORATION 
C.  C.  Coleman 

LECTURE  VI.    FIGURE  19 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

century.  The  picture  fills  the  end  of  a 
gallery  of  great  length,  but  only  twenty-six 
feet  wide  and  thirty-two  feet  high ;  and  of 
this  thirty-two  feet,  thirteen  feet  is  the 
height  of  the  semi-circular  lunette,  where 
the  wall  is  bounded  by  the  barrel-vault 
above.  That  lunette  then,  the  semi-circle 
and  a  little  more,  is  filled  with  a  great  com- 
position of  religious  significance,  and  below 
it  is  a  broad  band  forming  a  frieze  of  painted 
figures.  These  two  painted  surfaces  occupy 
all  of  the  wall  except  a  plain  gray  marble 
dado.  Right  in  the  middle  of  the  color 
composition  is  a  strange  oblong  panel  filled 
and  more  than  filled  by  a  secondary  panel 
in  the  form  of  a  broad  cross.  This  cross- 
shaped  panel  is  filled  by  a  Crucifixion;  the 
crucified  Saviour  and  the  cross  that  bears  him 
modelled  in  high  relief;  and  the  groups  of 
mouldings  which  inclose  the  panels  also 
in  relief  and  gilded  with  burnished  gold. 
At  the  sides  of  the  crucified  figure  are 
Adam  and  Eve  crouching;  held  to  the 
cross  by  the  blood-colored  band  of  drapery 
which  has  its  own  obvious  significance ;  and, 
[225] 


THE  INTERDEPENDENCE  OF 

by  a  very  unusual  reading  of  the  symbol,  it 
is  Adam  and  Eve  themselves  who  catch  in 
goblets  the  blood  that  drips  from  the 
wounds  made  in  the  hands  of  Christ.  The 
feet  of  Christ  press  upon  the  coiled  and 
folded  serpent,  whose  coils  however  hold 
fast  the  feet  of  Adam.  All  this,  you  under- 
stand, is  in  relief,  and  also  in  full  color  with 
much  use  of  gold,  and  this  forms  the  centre 
of  the  great  composition. 

Now,  the  lunette  above  and  around  the 
uppermost  member  of  the  cross  presents  a 
great  group  of  the  three  persons  of  the 
Trinity  draped  with  a  single  vast  robe,  upon 
the  border  of  which  is  wrought  the  often 
repeated  word,  Sanctus,  sanctus.  The  three 
faces  are  in  relief;  and  as  you  are  told,  and 
as  appears  true,  they  are  cast  in  the  same 
mould,  their  crowns  only  differing  as  differ, 
in  European  political  history,  the  crowns  of 
the  pope,  of  the  emperor,  and  of  the  king. 
The  figures  are  relieved  upon  a  splendid  back- 
ground of  sombre  blue,  like  that  of  the  mid- 
night sky.  The  frieze  below  is  occupied 
by  the  angels  of  the  Passion,  and  it  is  a  mag- 

[226] 


THE  ARTS  OF  DESIGN 

nificent  band  of  grandly  harmonized  color. 
The  whole  effect  gives  to  the  lover  of  mural 
decoration  but  little  to  desire;  and  yet  we 
know  that  the  effect  will  be  modified  when 
the  rest  of  the  hall  is  painted.  It  is  to  be 
hoped  that  the  artist  himself  will  be  there 
to  save  the  picture  from  possible  injury  by 
its  new  surroundings,  and  indeed  to  give  it 
that  slightly  modified  tone  which  the  new 
conditions  may  require. 


[227] 


N 


Sturgis  -  The  interdependence  ortne  art 


University  of  California 

SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 

405  Hilgard  Avenue,  Los  Angeles,  CA  90024-1388 

Return  this  material  to  the  library 

from  which  it  was  borrowed. 


OCT   1 


UCLA-Art  Library 

N7425S93I 

•••••MM 


I  n  in  i  mi  1 1  ii 
L  006  272  465  3 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


A    001  210454    3 


